Martin Magntorn: The Marl Pit

“In the garage of my childhood home lies a peeling plastic bag with ping pong paddles and a crumbled net. It’s a group portrait in a way, where each paddle becomes a character. My brothers and I run around the table with my dad. The objects trigger me to do something with them, something other than a photograph.

I decide to cast them in an epoxy-like plastic that I have worked with before. The ping pong paddles want to float to the surface, I put the metal holders for the net on top but the composition resists. The mixture should be cast in thin layers but I want to see what happens if everything is cast in one piece, despite curing that generates intense heat and threatens to crack the plastic. There is not enough epoxy to cover everything, I use an expired mixture that makes it a little yellower.

Suddenly everything is gone under the yellow surface in the water-filled marl pit out on the field where I lived as a child. There were eyes among the willow trees that bent down over the poisoned puddle. An old car stood halfway down in the water, there were diapers on the water’s edge and rusty barrels with skulls on them. We sometimes played there and fished for crayfish at night with a flashlight. They were completely soft in the shell and seemed mutated. The yellow water and an abandoned house nearby with a dead rat in the window was the closest I came to the experience of horror at that time.”
– Martin Magntorn

Martin Magntorn (b.1970) is educated in photography at the Valand Academy in Gothenburg. He is based in Malmö. His works often combine photography, sculpture, text, and archival material. The themes revolve around identity, displacement, and representation. His work has been shown in both group and solo exhibitions in Sweden and internationally.

Program and activities

August 25, 5 PM
Digital vernissage, Martin Magntorn and Pelle Kronestedt, director of operations at Centrum för fotografi, discuss the work via our Instagram.