[ Svenska ]______________________________________[ Start ]   Entering the cabinet of eerie creatures created by the artist Susanne Fagerlund evokes a mixture of horror and fascination. She uses deformed insects as cut-out dolls creating fables that hark back to everything from the artist Hieronymus Bosch and the author Edgar Allan Poe to the science fiction genre. She undertakes a laborious working process, crafting and mutilating the insects, photographing them manually slice by slice through a microscope and then finally staging the images using computer manipulation. The images are eccentric to say the least, and change between being surreal, magical, beautiful and menacing. The middle panel of the triptych, called 'The Dictator', is as threatening and dystopian as grandiose portraits of dictators. She cites Bosch and Star Wars among her major influences, but you can also sense Mark Ryden and Damien Hirst in her work. I can imagine how the artist, who I know is afraid of insects, is forcing herself to look though the microscope to reveal something of what she has kept in her glass jars. On closer examination it is clear that Susanne Fagerlund, rather than indulging in the disgusting, is passionate about the characters she photographs and stages on the computer. She uses the insects and her fear to challenge and develop her own self-awareness and not to represent a generic model of the world. Unknown forms through the microscope act as a Rorschach test. Images which she then uses to create a fairytale world with an eerie but surprising beauty. As headstrong as her staged tableaux are, the titles are jokingly dramatic and reveal the artist's associative intentions. Susanne offers us an interesting discourse in which our conceptions of the invisible, alien and threatening are given animal and insect forms. And in a broader perspective, she discloses how our society 'discovers' and keeps a check on what is alien by classifying and categorising it using our own personal projections. Hasse Persson, Mentoring & Museum Director Borås Art Museum