My art has been inspired by nature from my earliest days as an art student. However, since starting to work in my new studio in 2020, the plants and creatures of the forest and meadows in which it nestles have permeated my creative thoughts to a heightened degree. The result is that new life has entered my art as never before. At first tentatively – the odd flower here, the cheeky mushroom there – but then increasingly insistent, persistent and expansive. So now my work is full of life. Some familiar to all and some that is new to this world, having been forged by the union of emotional energy and the beauty of natural forms. Earlier this year, as I was busy preparing a solo exhibition of my new works, it was obvious to me that it should be called VÄXT. (“Växt” is Swedish for plant or growth – in my mind, simply LIFE.)Fast-forward to October 16th, the day the exhibition opened, and this tweet:How did Drottning Christina, who has been presumed dead for more than 300 years, come to be so effusive about my VÄXT exhibition? And why the link to alchemy?Back to a late summer, lazy, warm August evening, and discussions with friends about the new and wonderful lifeforms that had sprouted all over my work. The conversation idly turned to what would Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish creator of the binomial classification system of life, have made of my amazing new copper life. Things that look like life that we know but yet are profoundly different. How would he have classified them? Maybe he would have suggested that my ‘mushroom’ with twinned stalks should have ‘geminicaulus’ as part of its systematic name? Where would the strange sea-weeds, lichens, barnacles and flowers fit in the traditional subdivisions of the kingdoms of life? We could almost hear Linnaeus slamming down his beer mug and exclaim: “They have to be in a kingdom of their own. They can only be called Växt. Nothing else works!” in sheer frustration. His presence seemed so real, so vital that it made us wonder what other long-gone great minds might have made of this new kingdom of life: Växt. How would Charles Darwin have reacted at seeing this beautiful, delicate and iridescent life for the first time? And what about Drottning Christina? She would have been entranced by the way the colours of the new creatures changed with the light and she would have deemed them to be alive. Life breathed into copper. The inanimate made animate. Surely, we could hear her argue, this could only be the result of the work of a great and hitherto unrecognised alchemist. And there were others too. What if, we speculated, we were able to follow their thoughts and discussions about infusing inanimate metal with the lifeforce?And so it was that on September 11th several great minds came back to life. On Twitter. By giving them a new lease of life through this medium, we – and the rest of the world – could share their reactions to my art and, through their sometimes ill-tempered interactions with each other, their humanity. The assembled cast included: Carl Linnaeus (“Botanist. Author. Knight of the Order of the Polar Bear. Read my Systema Naturae and become wiser“), Christina of Sweden (“Swedish, single and proud. Abdicated monarch. Alchemist and seeker of arcane knowledge. Best idea ever: 15 kg copper lumps as currency. Now back”), René Descartes (“Philosopher. Mathematician. Scientist. Lover. I did not say “to be or not to be”. That was someone else”), Isaac Newton (“Uber nerd from Lincolnshire then Cambridge. My optics still look good after more than 280 years. Gravity baby!”), Charles Darwin (“Lover of natural history with a soft spot for finches. Explorer of new life and worlds”) and Mary Anning (“Broke fossil hunter. Lightning strike survivor. The world has used me ill but is making up for it”).Over the subsequent weeks the exchanges between the Twitter group increasingly referred to alchemy – mainly led by Christina – and it became clear that there are strong and long-standing associations between alchemy and Lund. This made us wonder what intriguing historical facts and perspectives might emerge if a group of people who are united by their interests in alchemy, the esoteric, and bringing life to inanimate objects, created a website in which they shared their knowledge and thoughts through blog spots. It was thus www.VÄXTalchemy.org came to be, bringing together an obscure collection of nerds, occultists and alchemy enthusiasts. Their posts, as might be expected, range from the deeply esoteric and cryptic to the historically interesting, with everything else in between.In midst of this online activity a freelance journalist comes across the Twitter accounts of the dead who have come to life. It strikes him that ‘fake accounts of historical people’ would make a good dissertation topic. As a tutor and mentor on the Media and Communication Studies Masters programme at Lund University he suggests this to Casper Ulvesson, a student on the programme. Casper agrees to take it on and starts his first dissertation video by filming next to Linnaeus’s statue in Lund. While doing so he discovers that cradled in the statue’s hand is a stone with the alchemical symbol for copper and the words: #VÄXT alchemy. Casper is aware that this hashtag has been used by some of the Twitter characters he is investigating so his interest is piqued. During his research he comes across an Instagram account that deals with alchemy and that, inexplicably, has uploaded a copy of the video he had just recorded by Linnaeus’s statue. Mystified and a little worried, he suspects that there’s something bigger going on than just fake Twitter accounts. His investigations lead him to the Gråbrödersgatan kvarter, whose links with alchemy are discussed by the VÄXT alchemy blogs. There he comes across Jäger & Jansson Galleri, where there is a poster for my forthcoming exhibition VÄXT. Casper cannot believe that this is a coincidence and decides to investigate further…Meanwhile, leading up to the opening of the exhibition, the Twitter group has come across pictures of my work “Book of Life”, which teems with mushrooms, that I made earlier this year and started to discuss whether it is metal that had been brought to life. Some speculated that I might in fact be an alchemist… At the opening of the exhibition I am confronted by Casper, who tries to find out if there is indeed ‘something bigger going on’. He also asks whether I have any connection with alchemy. It would seem that he found my answers less than convincing. Some of the Twitter group managed to view the exhibition and were very sweet in the way they tweeted about it. But it would seem that the big open book that I hung in the window of the gallery, from whose iridescently patinated copper pages explodes a myriad of vividly coloured mushrooms, being entitled “VÄXT alchemy” has only fuelled further talk of alchemy. As indeed has the talk that I am scheduled to give next week called “Art or alchemy? Or both?”…Life – in my metals, and outside of them – goes on, and the plot thickens…

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Below you will find a collation of the five Casper Ulvesson videos, just under five minutes in total.