Moa Gustafsson Söndergaards work is situated around materials and places we surround ourselves with. She is interested in the memories these places and objects carry with them and how they shape us and our society. Here practice is a combination of studio and field work. Where she collects materials, images and objects from different places and uses them as a starting point in her work. Söndergaard is interested in the idea of translation, the possibility to translate emotional experiences, landscape patterns or places into art. To translate is to reshape something, to make sense of it and to tell a different story. The work then becomes installations where she explores different sculptural techniques and combines them in the space she is exhibiting in. Working with architectural features of a space in relation to her work is an important part of her practice.
Söndergaard has a degree in fine art photography and what is still visible of her photographic past in her work today is her interest in movement and transformation. To capture something and translate it into a material. Her interest in movement both exists in the process of making but also in selection of materials that she works with. Materials that are reoccurring in her work are clay, metal, hemp thread and textile. She is drawn to materials that have a sense of resistance and are easily altered or cast into a shape. Materials that are connected to nature in some way or carry a narrative of its own. She also slowly has been returning to analog photography in her work as a way of mapping landscapes in change and documenting traces of time passing.
