In his studies of Shakespeare’s settings, the critic Northrup Frye created the phrase ‘the green world’. In his analysis, this world contrasts with the chaos and concrete of the city. Wild and unordered, the forest is a place where sensuous or supernatural events occur, unlike the order of the urban. But why is the city considered civilised and the forest lawless and unkempt? Cecilia Danell’s new show, The Upside Down World, reckons with this same dichotomy. Forests, once wild and ungovernable, are now increasingly managed spaces, where human intervention is always visible.
Last year, during a forest walk in her homeland of Sweden, Danell encountered a lake from her childhood. It was uncharacteristically still. Mesmerised by its reflection and an uncanny sense of doubling, it became the seed and the title painting of the show. These large-scale works ask us to look anew at what’s familiar, at what we think we know about everything we encounter. The sense of being absent from Sweden for so long has led to Danell reimagining its arboreal landscape as a place of contrasts: the hyper-reality of nature, but with an echo of Sci-Fi. In Immensity Made Manifold, an upended tree resembles a multi-tentacled creature. The palette reflects this strangeness – a lilac sky, rose-streaked tree-bark – an accumulation of hundreds of shades. Danell had an early interest in Colour Theory, and believes her work has gotten progressively more experimental with colour over the years.
Within these green dome settings, vertical daubs in neon shades appear, which for Danell, represent a gravitational pull. But there are invaders too: hunters who build blinds and desecrate rocks with instructions: Stå Här (‘Stand Here’). In Into the Unknown, an otherwise bucolic scene is interrupted by a yellow arrow defacing the trunk of a tree. Herein lies another conflict: the genuine human need to map and carve out a place in the world, and the artificial, intrusive branding of nature by hunters.
Danell consistently works in large scale, which makes each canvas feel like something to be stepped into. The size adds to the synesthetic quality: the sound bath of the forest, the smell of branches. The viewer too, starts to contemplate what path to follow, and what traces they might leave behind. In a society where solitude and silence are at a premium, these painted worlds offer escapism, and an opportunity for re-evaluating how the human and non-human co-exist. In a time of global conflict and fake news, where lines of (un) reality blur, Danell offers us a starting point; a new map co-ordinate in the show’s only textile piece. X Marks the Spot, a sewn tarpaulin, suggests we can choose not to follow the pack. We can find our own way and make sense of the current lived reality in an upturned world. The Upside Down World is rooted in the senses and tactility, and ultimately how we connect to each other, and to the environments we must strive to protect.
Sinéad Gleeson, May 2026
