In August 2022, the Futuristic Water Cowboys artwork by artist Amanda Karlsson was painted on a barge to be used by the workers involved in Gothenburg’s water production. The project was a collaboration between us and the City of Gothenburg’s Water and Wastewater Administration, which manages the city’s water, wastewater and waste. Another important goal of the administration is to equip the city to cope with heavy rainfall.
Amanda is based in Gothenburg but is originally from Karlstad in Värmland. She works full time with art and spends a lot of time in her studio in Gamlestaden here in Gothenburg which is shared with three other artists. Her entry into art was through storytelling. In her home region of Värmland, there is a storytelling tradition that often lies on the border between reality and fiction, and this has had a strong influence on her artistic work. As a child she loved fairy tales and then realised that she could tell them herself through her painting. This realisation came at the end of secondary school and since then she has studied at folk high school and individual courses at art college, but has mainly worked individually. She has always painted with oil paints with the exception of individual water-based paints when doing murals. In addition to oil paint, she has a strong interest in wood and often builds my paintings into wooden sculptures. The building itself is something that is really present throughout the process in her work. She often uses costumes, sets and props when constructing the paintings. For the painting of the village shanty, she tried to build a kind of water suction backpack out of cardboard.
What inspired me was the employees who will use it; those who work with water and waste management in the City of Gothenburg. I wanted to create a kind of alternate reality where they are seen from a science fiction perspective. Because both recycling and water are so fundamentally important to a city, I thought it was one of the professions that would endure into the future. I was interested in imagining this and hopefully encouraging viewers to imagine the same thing.
Amanda Karlsson
Amanda mainly tries to work with fiction as an artistic tool. Imaginary worlds and alternative realities. It can then fall towards dystopias and utopias and in her painting on the bush she herself is unsure which of them it belongs to. The title is Futuristic Water Cowboys and for her it brings to mind both a kind of humorous future in space but also a dystopian future of water scarcity.
The end result was great
Johan Ternstrand, Kretslopp och vatten-Göteborgs Stad
Futuristic Water Cowboys is the third art project that our organization and Kretslopp och vatten have created together with local artists. Amanda Karlsson also painted another work of art on Kungsgatan, while artist Camilla Boström was responsible for the creation of the painting on Almanacksvägen. Johan Ternstrand from the City of Gothenburg’s Recycling and Water Department explains that the idea to create art on the village roads was born during the two previous art projects. He says that Kretslopp och vatten was pleased with the collaboration and is looking forward to participating in more art projects in the future.
