GROWTH / DECAY – från frö till förfall

Cecilia Levy & Martin Bergström

Västerås konstmuseum
7 February to 20 September 2026

 

In the fragility of the moment just before something falls apart, that’s when time appears to change shape, turn to dust, morph into a memory, into onward movement. This exhibition takes as its starting point the cycles and permanent transformation of nature. It investigates the change from stability to disintegration, from manual to digital techniques, from darkness to light.

The beholder is invited into a spatial installation encompassing paper, textiles, and videos where each work bears traces of its own decomposition. Intricate jacquard fabrics with organic patterns are draped to produce a layer effect next to fragile plant objects made of paper. In the brightest of openings, what sprouts is decomposed; in the darkest of corners, something new germinates. And so everything begins anew.

Nothing disappears; everything remains.

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Curator: Martina Mac Queen
Producer: Andrea Hasselrot
Visual Concept: Martin Bergström
Photos: Thomas Klementsson

Cecilia Levy creates sculptural objects using paper. When making new works for this exhibition, Levy’s thoughts centred on various oppositions and on the circular and cyclical: death and life, the endless loop. She delved into the soil, inspired by the world of microscopic organisms. We see an alternative nature sprouting, with hats, funnels, and other appendixes growing from sticks and twigs picked in the woods around her home. The book paper she uses was made from trees that once stood in different woods in a different era. Now those trees pass into yet another form.

In her art, Levy also emphasises issues concerning the value that we ascribe to nature. For example, herentirely white sculptures of Swedish province flowers are made from the same cotton pulp – a residual product of the textile industry – that is used to manufacture banknotes.

Martin Bergström engages in a cross-boundary practice spanning various materials and expressions – from fashion, scenography, and dance costumes to interior design, textiles, glass, and metal. His idiom is based on the deconstruction and abstraction of natural phenomena, yielding organic patterns and materials. There is often an underlying note of darkness, both metaphorically and literally. Bergström is fascinated by the perishable, by anything that is on the cusp of its own decomposition. Ever since his fashion collection and project entitled Strike a Pose and Decompose over twenty years ago, he has consistently applied the same cyclical principles: growth and decay, resurrection and decomposition. In this exhibition, he takes his work one step further, as in his digital jacquard fabric – a technique combining historical traditions of craftsmanship with contemporary digital innovation.

In the structure of the fabric, the passing of time becomes tangible: thread after thread meet, cross, and stretch until there emerges a pattern which does not exist in its complete form until the weaving of the fabric is finished. In his pattern worlds, Bergström goes back to herbarium plants from the late 19th century – flowers which were once picked and preserved on paper in a herbarium and which now, 150 years later, gain new life in a different material and a different temporal context. These works move between presence and absence, offering a poetic reflection on the ephemerality of life, on memory, and on what is sprouting still.