The mine, Kiirunavaara, is the reason this Swedish town of roughly 20,000 people deep in northern Lapland exists at all. It is one the world's largest underground iron ore mines, and it dominates both economically and visually, the smokestacks sending up twin plumes of black smoke from the denuded mountain like a kind of Arctic Mordor.
As well as being less picturesque, the new city centre is colder: flatter, windier and more exposed, though presumably the new buildings will mitigate that barrenness.
But she says it remains important to show that there is more to Kiruna than the wishes of the company. One of her artworks displayed at the gallery is a bouncy castle, shaped and painted to resemble a mountain. A window beside it has a view of an actual mountain, Luossavaara – a disused mine – as well as tiny mountains of rubble: the first construction sites of the new Kiruna buildings. "I don't think I need to explain the sadness," she says, and mentions another mining project – this one in Jokkmokk, in Sami territory south of Kiruna.
"My cousin, who's a reindeer herder, said it very well. He was like, 'Where they want to drill the hole, that area's not really our most prominent [territory]. But we have to, now, say No. Because when the mine starts to make money, we can't stop it.