Chin Chin is the name she used when she first came to Berlin, quite a long time ago now. The year was 2003 and Emeli Theander supported herself by selling screen prints at the flea market at Boxhangener Platz in Friedrichschain. After five years at Berlin University of the Arts and an exchange semester in Seoul, she has left the pseudonym Chin Chin behind and made a complete shift into fine art and oil paintings. She has her own studio in Berlin, opposite an enormous building which Emeli herself likens to the Death Star in Star Wars. When I visit on an early autumn evening in 2014, she serves wine and talks about her art. The windows are open, and outside the S-Bahn thunders past at regular intervals. Emeli has just returned from Switzerland, where she participated in the group exhibition La Vengance de Mathilde which centres around the figure of the angel in art through the ages.

Your paintings are like a world that you can climb into and wander around.

“I think of it as a parallel world. A playground where the people I paint can exist.

“I also see it as a type of image series. Something I create in one image is repeated in the next. It could be the mood, a colour or a new trick that gets taken into the next painting.”

The figures you paint, do they have clear personalities?

“Yes, some are extremely clear in my head. I believe that some of them are sisters and that they hang out together. But when a picture is new, I don’t have that type of relationship with it, as that’s something that only develops later, which is when I can start to understand what it might be about.”

‘Circles in your mind’,   Emeli Theander,  ‘I was guided to get here’

Do you see the figures as your friends?

“Absolutely.They might look scary, but I have a lot of empathy for them, even the ones that are hard work and odd. For me, they are a bit like children, and I have a slightly ironic relationship with some of them. I think they are great fun and sweet in their own way. Some people think my pictures are so dark. I don’t completely agree with this interpretation, but I work a lot with ambivalent feelings. I like it when people look at something and can’t decide which side it is on. As though it were on that line, wavering between falling or not falling into the dark. A space between, a state in which you don’t know what’s real or not real. A dichotomy.”

There is also a lot of tenderness in the pictures.

“They are outsiders. People who don’t fit in.”

Do you identify yourself with them?

“Yes, they come from an extremely personal place. Yet, while there are different parts of me in the pictures, there are also parts of other people. I believe many people can also see different parts of themselves in them.”

You said that some of them are sisters?

“Yes, I think that they are sisters, or that they are kids. But I also think of them as matryoshka dolls. As in layer on layer, doll in doll, world in world.”

Sisters are of course siblings, but also an affinity among women.

“Yes, like finding solidarity in that feeling of being an outsider. Take the girls in the painting Hooligan Hearts, for example, I think that if I had a euro techno band, they’d be in my band.”

‘Ballerinor’ (‘Ballerinas’), ‘Hooligan Hearts’, ‘Dirty Dancing’

Is it difficult to let go of the paintings if you have personal relationships with them?

“No, I am not that sentimental, but I think it’s sad if a painting can’t be exhibited before being sold. If it is on display, then it’s like it gets to live a little, then move away from home. I think that it’s fun to hear what other people see in the pictures, as it’s often things I haven’t even considered myself. I know that the buyers of a painting I did called ‘Nachtmahr’ (‘Nightmare’), which is my version of the mare that people ride at night, hung it above the bed in their bedroom. It is extremely large, dark and has erotic accents. Nothing I would want in my bedroom. I often get told ‘I really like this picture, but my partner refuses to have it in the house, it’s way too dark.’ And many people believe that I am a man when they look at the art. There was one occasion when an old man said to me ‘But you’re such a small girl, surely you can’t have painted all these pictures’.”

Why do you think this is?

“Personally, I find it difficult to believe why they think that. Maybe because there is a lot of sexuality in them, and they are so big.”

Where do you find your inspiration?

“I usually spend a lot of time checking different blogs, pictures, things you find on the internet. Poetry is also important, I want my art to be considered as poetry. I can read a sentence or a word or a feeling, which I then translate visually in my head. Song lyrics and music are also important. I am also inspired by older art and have tried to translate pictures from art history, Ophelia in the reeds, for example. Nedstörtad ängel by P O Enqvist has influenced me, as well as Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. The book was very important to my relationship with my mother. I have a painting that was named after it. It was however the title and book cover that were important to me, not so much the actual content of the book. My mother died at the time I was painting that picture, which naturally influenced me a lot.

It is a woman lying bound in the water and is about being bound before things you cannot influence. Powerless before death.”

But we are also bound within a mother and daughter relationship

“Yes, a person is also bound to their history. We cannot change it. We can change the way we perceive it, but not what happened. This change is significant, and the transformation is a recurring subject in my art.”

How?

“I think about it a lot. About human-animal transformation, for example. I have an ongoing project called Skinwalker. It is inspired by native American tribes in the USA and their rituals in which they dress in animal heads to become their totem animal. I depict a lot of animals in the pictures and these become symbols of human characteristics. For example, if I see a hare, I immediately think that it has a rabbit’s heart, is nervous and afraid. I see it as though I have created my own symbolic alphabet.”

Can you talk a bit more about that?

“Yes, the chess board patterns I use probably relate to things that are difficult to work out. The hare is fear, the birds are a desire for freedom. Then, there are masks in nearly all my paintings. Nearly all figures are wearing some kind of mask and it is something that I think about and try and work out what it could be. Maybe a layer between self and reality. That we play different roles in the world.”

It’s as though you speak through the pictures when you have no words.

“Yes, its exactly that. It’s the very delicate emotional states and stories in your head, that are purely intuitive and you may sense the story rather than there being any formal beginning or end.”

Can we talk a bit about totem animals, do you have one?

“Yes, I believe so, but what I think it is changes a little according to my mood. Sometimes it’s a cat or lynx. Sometimes a crocodile. And often various birds or a fox.”

How do you think they differ in temperament?

“Birds are quick and associated with freedom of thought. I love magpies because there are so many myths about them. Some people say that the they have a drop of the devil’s blood under their tongues, and others say that it is lucky to eat a fruit a magpie has pecked. For me, crocodiles are ancient, wise and sensitive, they cry their crocodile tears and so on. And lynx are rare and shy, but it used to be said that a great secret is hidden in places where a lynx has peed.”

How fantastic that something so dirty has become something romantic.

“Yes, and so secretive. But, above all, I believe I am a hawk.”