Vildmark Archives is a collection of paintings about what remains, what disappears, and what we may still be able to save.

My first painting, We Are Still Here, was inspired by the animals living in the abandoned zone around Chernobyl — a place people had left, but life had not.

I didn't know it then, but I had already found a question I would keep returning to.

What remains after we leave?

Since then, the question has taken different forms. An animal crossing an empty road. Figures walking silently through a dream. A dog watching the last ships leave. Animals thriving in places that have changed around them. Places where something seems to have happened just before we arrived.

Some paintings are concerned with what has been left behind. Others with what is still here — and what we are in danger of losing.

I am drawn to animals not simply as subjects, but as inhabitants, witnesses and survivors. I am equally drawn to the traces we humans leave around them: buildings, roads, objects and landscapes that continue to exist after their original purpose has gone.

There is often a story behind a painting, but I don't want to tell all of it.

Some works carry small fragments of that story — a sentence, an observation, perhaps something remembered. They are clues rather than explanations. The rest belongs to the viewer.

Vildmark Archives is the evolving body of work of Swedish artist L. M. Åkesson.