Art after death: in conversation with artist Yngvild Saeter

Exiting the subway at the suburb Bergshamra, a stone’s throw from the inner city of Stockholm, I find myself in the concrete centre, flanked by a church and grocery store. After a few left turns, I am in the middle of a field. That’s the beauty of Stockholm, how quickly you can travel from man-made to nature. Another left turn and I’m in a garden, right by the water.

The wind whistles through the trees. I look down at my phone to find the last step of instructions, “Call me when you get to the small parking lot, by the allotment house, overlooking the water.” I make the call. Seconds later, I turn to see the artist Yngvild Saeter, waving her arms enthusiastically in greeting, accompanied by her dog Oda. She is dressed completely in beige, her long red hair in pigtails.

Saeter moved out to her allotment cottage when the pandemic hit and hasn’t really left since. After eagerly giving me a tour of her enormous garden, we enter the little house. “It has everything you need,” she says, showing me around. “It was built in the early 20th century, and the man I bought it from insulated the entire house, so you can live here all year around.” She likes that it’s “near the city, but still isolated, and so close to nature.” Saeter’s artistic practice yields futuristic monolithic sculptures constructed from pieces of motorcycles, other found objects and natural materials such as wood, fur, and horn.

The sculptures, often donned with chains, metal rivets and spikes and painted with lacquer, play tricks on your eyes, forcing you to think hard about what it is you are looking at. She is a fascinating storyteller, with a cache of insights regarding how we as people approach our everyday life. She is passionate about a myriad of causes and, at the same time, intensely settled in her demeanour. It’s probable Saeter’s calm presence stems from her very eclectic background, perhaps most importantly, her life-defining experience of confronting mortality at a young age.

“I grew up in a village in Norway with a population of 40 people and it’s very picturesque. It’s postcard Norway, basically, and there’s a huge sense of community,” she says. “Of course, being 40 people in a village, most of them are 60-plus. The only kids in the village were me and my sister.” Her father is a writer and journalist, and her mother works for various NGOs, with a background in organic farming. Family is very important to Saeter, and in many ways influenced her choices and interests at an early age.

Related: Meet Carl Kostyál: The visionary Swedish gallerist shaking up Stockholm's art scene

When I ask about why she became an artist, she smiles. “I mean, it wasn’t a straight path by any means. My grandfather on my father’s side was a spy during the war, a member of the Resistance, and he was sent to a prison camp,” she says. “My grandfather and my father started collecting stories from other people who were in the Resistance in Norway during the war. I heard a lot of stories about the Holocaust from a very young age. I was very interested in it and couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of genocide and of evil.” Saeter continues: “Listening to these stories really shaped me. When I was very young a friend of mine was murdered and that lead me to study the concept of evil further.”

It was this traumatic moment that led Saeter to Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, as well as the work of political theorist, Hannah Arendt. She dug ever deeper, studying genocide and evil at university in Oslo for six years.It wasn’t until after these years spent obsessively digging into the morbid and horrific that Saeter found herself at art school in Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden and later in Copenhagen. At first, she focused on photography and film; making short films with props, experimenting, making work that focused on masculinity, cruiser cars and football.

It was during this time, in 2016, while living in Copenhagen, that Saeter was diagnosed with a very rare brain malformation. The incredibly serious diagnosis came with huge consequences – she could become paralysed or even die if not treated. “I’d had issues since I was a teenager; headaches, bad balance and sudden weakness in my limbs, but never understood where it stemmed from,” she explains. Saeter had to act quickly. “When I received the diagnosis, it was such a relief to know that I am not crazy, to finally get answers, but it was also scary. I also had plans of doing sculpture for a long time, so I decided to just do something big before, you know, I became paralysed. I was very dramatic...I was like, ‘I’m going to die so I need to do what I want to do!’”

The drive to create and push her artistic boundaries spurred her on. “I bought an old cruiser car and a friend lent me a lot of heavy-duty tools. I spent a month ripping apart the car and making sculptures with the parts. So that was kind of the first sculpture project that I did, and afterwards I had my surgery.” There were complications during the surgery, the surgeons cut an artery during the procedure and she was technically dead for minutes. “That’s kind of the turning point, not only of my artistic practice, but my life. I had this very beautiful death experience that felt incredibly real,” she says.

The experience of death is hard to define – was something experienced – or simply a memory constructed to mimic it after the fact. The artist acknowledges this notion, explaining, “I describe it like this: it was something between a very intense dream you’ve had and a childhood memory that brings you a lot of comfort and joy, or just like when you smell something from your childhood you can’t really realise where it comes from.”

Saeter is adamant that the experience of dying “is the only time I have felt completely happy and completely safe in a way that I didn’t think was possible. I feel safe generally, and I am a happy person, but nothing like this, it was just insane.” This intrinsic feeling is carried into her memory. “I have been obsessed with these certain kinds of shapes and that is because they are the shapes I remember seeing in my experience, it comes out through the sculptures I make.”

Having researched her death experience thoroughly, Saeter, tells me all about endorphins and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a chemical substance that exists in plants, animals and is also used as a recreational psychedelic drug. According to Saeter, and scientists, DMT already exists within us, and is released into the body when you die. Since this action has no practical function, the only explanation of the chemical release is that it is intended to give the person a sense of calm or peace during the death experience.

Related: "I'm never happy with my own work. I can't stand it" Meet the artist: Fatima Moallim

“I have had a lot of people come up to me and tell me that they have had a death experience. What’s interesting is that everyone has seen the same kind of images,” she says. “People see things symmetrically. Everyone kind of sees the wing-shaped shapes, and that explains a lot when it comes to religion, and the concept of angels, I think.” Saeter continues, “Most people who die do not have this positive kind of experience, around 30 per cent, I think. Then there’s this small percentage of people that have a very negative experience, like the same intensity but horrible. That could also explain the concept of heaven and hell. For me, religion makes a lot more sense after experiencing death.”

She isn’t necessarily religious, or even spiritual, but Saeter finds solace in the magic of science. Our bodies, especially our minds, can do so many incredible things and go to so many places. “Just look at a leaf. It’s so complicated and magical that it could just grow out of the earth. Just compare it to how we move our hands, the way our bodies work, it’s insane if you think about it,” she says. Certain elements of her illness can’t be fixed. Saeter lives with chronic pain, in a body that doesn’t fully cooperate. However, it’s in this state of being that her work has evolved.

Every element of her practice is directly related to her body, her physical capacity. “I use a very light clay that’s super easy to work with and it allows me to kind of go into this super meditative state and just work and just feel how my body is feeling and just translate it into work, so that’s been very good for me in dealing with my illness,” she says. The shapes and figures Saeter makes are intertwined with chains and spikes, often conjuring sado-masochistic associations. She understands the reference, but also finds it funny.

In between her studies and life on the farm she was a model and started traveling the world at a very young age. Working in cities such as Milan, New York and Paris she found immense comfort in the website Myspace and the punk scene in the various places she visited. “The punk scene gave me a huge sense of safety, and that’s why there are a lot of elements of punk in my work, because I like to reference everything that resembles the feeling you have when you are safe as a child,” she explains. “That’s why I use a lot of sheep fur and horse gear, as well as studs and chains and piercings. They all kind of fit into the same realm in my brain.”

Bringing elements of her upbringing in northern Norway – nature and animals – and marrying them with the stark contrast of the punk aesthetic – rivets, and metal chains – creates enormous duality in Saeter’s artistic practice. She gathers inspiration by compounding it, fusing her love of nature with contemporary visual cues. “Nature is very important. That’s why I live in this cabin close to the forest, but, and I know this is a bit cheesy, on Instagram you get so much visual content. Somehow I compile it all into this ball of inspiration,” she says.

Geographical locations also play a huge part in Saeter’s practice. She recently spent a month on Gotland, a large island off the coast of Sweden with distinct flora and fauna. “I just realised yesterday how influenced I am by Gotland. I look at my two most recent works and they’re in Gotland type colours, soft beige you know? Very much like a beach on the island, with rock formations.”

I press for more sources of inspiration, Saeter relents and finally says, “When it comes to artists, even though I don’t love her work, I feel very connected to the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, because of how she worked despite, or maybe even because of her illness. I think she worked a lot with her illness in the way I do, working through it and feeling your body and kind of translating it into your work. I am also inspired by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who had a connection to another realm. For me that realm is inside my brain. It feels like she had this connection to another place through her artistic practice.”

Related: Artist Constance Tenvik has built a career creating complex mystical puzzles

Towards the end of our conversation Saeter and I briefly discuss her activism, and how, through small but very meaningful interventions, she helps aspiring artists through a grant she initiated a few years ago. The grant isn’t big, but she aims to give it to 10 young artists each year, picking names of the applicants out of a hat. “Last year you could apply if you were LGBTQIA+ or IPOC or if you live with a chronic illness. Anything that makes you thought of as less ‘competitive’ in the art world,” she explains. Between the grant, donating a portion of her earnings each year to charity and buying art from young, emerging artists, Saeter’s goal is that her contributions to the world should be fundamentally positive. With a huge smile on her face, she reflects, “It’s a very small gesture but I think it’s important to support people who are just starting out.”