Bellbind And Fireweed

Two figures stand on top of a colossal pipe, kissing. One wears an orange jacket, the other dark clothes, and they are small enough that you could cover them with a thumbnail. The pipe they are standing on snakes across the whole picture and off into the fog, joined by others, all of them crusted with moss and lichen and banded with rusting rings. Pink spikes of fireweed push out of every crack and seam.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish painter born in 1984 who started out illustrating birds and countryside before he began slipping machinery into his landscapes. He is best known for the books Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood and The Electric State, all built on the same idea: enormous technology sitting in ordinary Scandinavian scenery while people get on with their lives around it. The title here is worth knowing. Bellbind is a bindweed that twists around and smothers whatever it climbs, and fireweed is the plant that races into burned and bombed ground first, which earned it the nickname bombweed in Britain after the Blitz. Both are weeds that thrive on wreckage. Whatever these pipes once carried, nobody is maintaining them now, and the flowers have moved in. The embrace at the centre is the smallest detail in the painting and the hardest one to walk past.