The Anchor Hits the Sand, 2019

Jockum Nordström

Curator Annika Gunnarsson tells the story of an installation that emerged after an unexpected incident in the artist’s studio at closing time.

Annika Gunnarsson: I, the person telling you about this work, am Annika Gunnarson. I’m a curator at Moderna Museet, responsible for prints and drawings. This part of the collection comprises around 40,000 works, with a focus on Swedish artists and a few international highlights from the 20^th century.
 
Twenty years ago, I organized an exhibition with Jockum Nordström at the museum. That was my first encounter with Jockum’s parallel universe, one populated by a whole host of characters and stories, all living their own lives.
 
Jockum Nordström created The Anchor Hits the Sand for a 2020 show at Skissernas Museum—Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art in Lund. At first glance, it may seem simple, composed of leftover scraps from his collage practice. 
 
The idea came to Nordström when he noticed how the light filtered through some sheets of paper that he’d primed and hung to dry. Inspired, he added a few characters to the paper and began experimenting with flashlights. One evening, when he’d turned off the lights in his studio and was about to leave, a car passed by outside and its headlights set the characters in motion. Magic ensued.
 
Behind the paper screen is a mechanism constructed by the artist using motors, lamps, and colored filters. It can be glimpsed through an opening in the wall of the adjacent gallery. The meditative soundscape that accompanies the work is a collage of songs from Jockum’s LP collection. It’s mixed by Rudolf Nordström, better known as Mr. Tophat.
 
With The Anchor Hits the Sand, Jockum breaks new ground in his practice. In this dreamlike play of shadows, he merges history and the present, fantasy and reality, and art and play.
 
The work was acquired by Moderna Museet in 2021 as part of the Swedish Acquisitions initiative, supported by the Friends of Moderna Museet.