Five letters in a row: E, L, I, N, A. The E has several more horizontal strokes than the E Iwill later learn in school, the N is reversed, and the A is upside down. It doesn’t matter. Ican read it, and others can, too. Once I learned how to write my name, I couldn’t stop. Iwrote it everywhere—on my toys and on my bed frame, on the walls, the doors, theledges. There is something visceral about leaving marks and traces of oneself on differentmaterials and surfaces. Pencil on raw wood, pen on paint, and waxy crayon on plastic.Speaking and writing are part of a collective knowledge that is based on complexstructures and technologies. Walls and screens are flat surfaces that we use fororientation and as sources of information. We navigate. Slowly we are shaped. I’mtouching, tracing, and marking. Leaving something of myself behind. A record. Anencounter and exchange between my hand, the tool, and the surface. The surface isforever marked, forever destroyed, forever scarred. ELINA.In this master essay, Elina Birkehag collects her notes and reflections during her years ofmaster studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. The essay consists of two parts.The first is written in her studio during her final year of studies, the months before her soloexhibition MOUTH TO WALL at the end of 2022. The second part is a collection of notesfrom the forests and wetlands of Dalarna, as she has been looking for tree carvings leftthere by women tending cattle a few hundred years ago.