Every morning, Swedish artist Malin Gabriella Nordin spends up to two hours retracing the landscapes, colours, and paintings she encounters in her sleep. From her current New York residency, she tells Vogue Scandinavia how a lifelong fascination with dreaming has shaped an instinctive practice – and why she is forever chasing the paintings she can see but never quite reach
Malin Nordin’s working day begins before she wakes up. Each morning, the Swedish artist gives herself an hour, sometimes two, to lie still and retrace where her mind travelled in her dreams. As the morning light seeps through the window, she writes down what she remembers from the night by hand. Her radio alarm clock sits in another room – hearing people speak too soon can make her dreams disappear – and she makes her notes before coffee, conversation, or the intrusion of her phone. “I always go through them [the dreams] before I do anything else,” she says from her studio in Brooklyn (when we speak, she’s two months into a three-month residency with the Mack Art Foundation). “It doesn't have to be a remarkable dream. I just want to know what happened during the night. I think it's very intriguing.”
Nordin’s fascination with the liminal space between sleeping and waking runs deeper than any rigid morning routine. At 14, the artist struggled with sleep paralysis. In her first episode, she remembers waking up, unable to move, hallucinating a shadowy figure dragging her across the floor. “It’s always scary to wake up in them,” she says, “because it’s like you wake up in a different frequency where everything is just evil, and you can’t move.” The episodes have evolved since, sometimes tipping into out-of-body experiences. Terrifying as they are, they opened the door for Nordin to explore altered states and lucid dreams. “I’m really interested in experimenting in the dream world,” she says, something that has fundamentally impacted her work.
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Nordin works instinctively, resulting in organic, swooping shapes and vivid colours. Over the Rise, 2022. Photo: Märta Thisner
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Nordin recently completed a prominent summer artist residency with the Mack Art Foundation in New York. Photo: Märta Thisner