För My: memories of My Atlegrim

Kurt Snoekx
© BRUZZ
11/10/2016
© Heleen Rodiers | My Atlegrim

With the special issue För My and an exhibition of the same name at Maison Pelgrims, the children's fanzine Cuistax, friends, and colleagues are paying a warm-blooded tribute to My Atlegrim, the wonderful and talented fairy from the North who left us all too soon on 22 March.

"The end: a withering flower? Think again." Two short sentences to resist the sombre, pitch-black thoughts that coloured our days in the aftermath of 22 March, the day that made Brussels part of the international battlefield that the world has become. Two sentences of which the small poetry and great truth sound so damn painful now, but which, here and now, like a bunch of beautiful wildflowers, we can pick from the book Propos autour de la fleur in order to hear their creator's voice one last time: gentle but fearless, light-hearted and profound.

22 March, that day of all days that we would like to stifle, cost us so much. It also cost us My Atlegrim, an amazing soul and a great heart about which we do not want to remain silent. Her work, a permanent quest for an ethereal beauty, forbids silence. "Along with the wilted flower, there are also secrets that have fallen to the ground, and now sink into the soil to await the right moment to resurface," she continues. Memories of My: an attempt to stretch time.
1542 couv My Atlegrim

CRUSHING CHICKPEAS
"Tapestry and knitting are very slow, meditative. Untangling all the threads untangles your mind. But drawing is just as important to me. It is a very intuitive activity, you do it fast and there are many little accidents that might happen, things you cannot undo. That is what makes it fun because it allows you to discover and understand things," My Atlegrim told us in the spring of 2013, when we visited her studio in the luscious green of the Duden Park for our Wunderkammer series. Art as a penetration of the soul: it is this idea that led the warm-blooded fanzine for children Cuistax, where My Atlegrim was part of the core team of illustrators/helping hands, to edit a moving homage För My, and her partner Louis Vanardois, friends from the Palais des Thés, and illustrator colleagues to set up an exhibition of her work at Maison Pelgrims.

Chloé Perarnau, who along with Fanny Dreyer is the driving force behind Cuistax: "Being confronted with her images – far more than we had expected – so many months after the attacks, and going through them all together, was very poignant and very intimate." Fanny Dreyer: "My immediately fit in with the Cuistax team. When we organised a fundraising dinner for the former Compilothèque, she spent four hours crushing chickpeas: 'Non non, ça va.' [Laughs] It was heart-warming to see the number of reactions we got to our call for the special issue of Cuistax. It was an opportunity to remember My and spend a little bit more time with her. The exhibition is intended to keep her work alive."

The work of My Atlegrim, who was born in Umeå in northern Sweden and moved to Belgium in 2005 – first to Tubize but soon after to Brussels – deserves this warm attention. Her books, drawings, paintings, collages, digital work, and needlework take on a fascinating variety of forms, with one foot in the Swedish mould of craftsmanship and tradition and the other in the shoe of a curious explorer of new possibilities and stories.

INTO THE WILD
"The wonderful thing about My," says Anne Brugni, a member of the Cuistax team and along with McCloud Zicmuse, the founder of Hôtel Rustique, where My Atlegrim had a solo show in the winter of 2014, "is that she didn't have a preferred technique. She could make whichever work with whichever tool and you would always be able to recognise her hand in it." Fanny Dreyer: "It is my impression that everything was part of the same gesture, the same logic, and that she approached everything with the same concentration."

It is this exactingness that characterised My Atlegrim. One example is the impressive Propos autour de la fleur, a publication that she made from A to Z with her former partner, the graphic artist and bookbinder Sukrii Kural. "The texts, the illustrations, the mise-en-page, the printing, the binding… Just to see if it was all possible," she said in 2013. "My was very down to earth but at the same time she had her head high up in the clouds. Realism and ambitious imagination, combined in the best imaginable sense," Loïc Gaume confirms. For a year, he, My Atlegrim, and Chris De Becker formed the Module Image collective, created to share its love for illustration, contemporary images, and books with the public by organising intimate exhibitions and workshops for children. "She knew exactly where she wanted to go, and she determined that direction herself. Many things inspired her, but she never followed fashions. Her work is a constant questioning. She never considered anything to be finished, and she constantly transgressed whatever boundaries stood in her way. She was a beautiful person and an incredible talent."

Anne Brugni concurs: "There is a very liberated, spontaneous, and uncomplicated side to her work. And that makes it honest and genuine. My's work is often described as being very poetic, and it is, but it is more than that. There is something more profound and complex about it, something that beautifully reflects the light and darkness in the world. It is very holistic. She was certainly able to make beautiful images, but she didn't necessarily follow the dominant aesthetic. She also made bizarre things, somewhere between the figurative and the abstract, that are not obvious and which resist simplistic interpretations." Chloé Perarnau: "As a children's illustrator, you quickly run the risk of oversimplification. My didn't shy away from weighty topics, but she did it with great finesse. She thought of children as readers with the necessary intelligence to process this complexity. She was not afraid of occasionally venturing into the grotesque, the brightly coloured, strangely formed, or terrifying." Fanny Dreyer: "That was the surprising thing about My: I was deeply touched by the difference between her personality, which was very refined and sensitive – initially she was almost timid – and her images, which could sometimes harbour a kind of violence and depth."

MYSTERIOUS WAYS
"If as a child you devour Tove Jansson's Moomins and the work of Astrid Lindgren, there are clearly consequences," Dennis Marien laughs. He founded the Brussels fanzine Vite – in which My once published a story that was based on a song by Joanna Newsom – and also studied at Saint-Luc, as she did "with an endearing sort of French." "Her youth in Sweden was still a profound influence on her work," Louis Vanardois, My Altegrim's partner and kindred spirit, confirms. "She continued to cherish the green, the vegetation, the landscape." And it showed. In Quatre saisons en douze mois, a book in one volume that she also made with Sukrii Kural, My Atlegrim follows the progress of time in nature. "Both my parents are biologists. We were always in the woods, all of us, from our earliest years. We knew all the names of the plants and the birds. That is all part of who I am and I accept that unquestioningly. I have many beautiful memories and rich experiences of my childhood. So why wouldn't I share them?" My said in 2013.
My Atlegrim
© My Atlegrim | My Atlegrim
Her youth, her love of nature, of books, of lines, forms, textures, and colours – "a way to break through the black and white of a large part of the Swedish year" – are all central elements in the work of My Atlegrim. The combination of a disarming amazement and the total absence of fear marked her as a person. Or in the words of Maïa Vandaele, her colleague at Palais des Thés and also an illustrator herself: "There is the poetry, or the connection that she saw between tea and her drawings, the evocative power of both. But more than anything, it is the freedom and spontaneity of her work that appeal to me profoundly. She was fearless, she didn't worry at all about what people thought of her work. It was what it was. She was similarly uninhibited in her attention to other people. I still remember her smile, the way she would touch you in passing, the drawings she would give everyone as gifts."

Loïc Gaume: "Her work is inhabited and enchanted. It is not formal, but genuinely alive, in motion, and free. That was her great power. Switching between a kind of medieval iconography and very contemporary visual language, between bright colours and completely black surfaces… Timeless." Louis Vanardois: "My's power is in the liveliness of her drawings. She had a brilliant eye for synthesis, and her work was very communicative. She managed to fill it with all kinds of things, without making her drawings wooden or immobile." Perhaps that is why Dennis Marien cannot clearly remember a single one of her works, either on paper or textiles. "They escape me, they are still ungraspable. As though there is a spot on the images, you never see it all. My's work will continue to inspire because it never grows old."

För My, 14 > 30/10, Maison Pelgrims, Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles

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