Tales of the Moss People
From Kim Simonssons book “Tales of the Moss People”
I’m thinking the coolest art show I’ve been to in the last twenty years or so was the Kim Simonsson “Tales of the Moss People” show at the Swedish Institute in Minneapolis in the spring of 2018.
Girl with two headed Rabbit
He had placed these porcelain sculptures of the “moss people” around the Swedish Institute in various poses and in some surprising spots. They looked like futuristic feral children from some lost tribe that had gone on a nomadic quest from a place they had to leave. They are carrying “old” technology as artifacts and fetish objects from what is their past but our present: old boom boxes, radios, etc. The sculptures are flocked with a moss-green velvety textured coating - the artist found that if he used this “ugly yellow nylon fiber flocking material” on things he painted black, it created this beautiful moss-like surface on them.
In interviews, he cites manga as an influence on his work, and my son Mick pointed out a clear influence from artist Junji Ito in particular.
Junji ito, Pocket Curse Blind Box Figure
For a biography of this artist I am going to direct you to this video of him telling a little of his story. One of his studios in Finland is in Fiskar, on the site of the Fiskar Scissors Company manufacturing plant. Incredible! The Fiskar company started in something like 1649! And, by the way, the video shows him walking around in the area and I have to say it looks a lot like Minnesota :-)
Watch this! You won't regret it!
This too! It shows one of the most incredible artworks I’ve ever seen!
When I was walking through this exhibit, my mind made this very simple-minded connection to something I had stumbled upon online a few years before. I got into clicking these links for “unexplained mysteries”. The links would take you to a list of 10 historical mysteries that had supposedly never been explained, like an old photo of a guy in a crowd in the 1930s holding what looked like an iPhone or something. I was using these as idea generators for artworks or stories I would write by filling in the backstory for the time travel or whatever it suggested. Anyway, one of the links took me to some old English newspaper account of “green children” showing up in a little village and they couldn’t describe where they had come from but said that everything there was green and it sounded kind of like a little faerie world. I thought maybe they had looked like these moss people sculptures.
After walking through the show and looking at all this amazing art, we went to the gift shop of course, and found a copy of a book Kim Simonsson had made with a little story that went with the pictures and it is one of my favorite books of all time! If you can find a copy anywhere buy it!
It appears to be a little hard to find now and sold out at every site-I think it was maybe a limited run-but maybe he’s made a few more copies now.
The Moss People have really traveled the world. I googled the show and it looks to be in Miami, FL now. If you ever get a chance, go see them! They will blow your mind!
