2014
KINO
CONVERSATION PIECE, CRYSTAL QUARTZ, GOLD, TANTALUM, OPTICAL FILM, SCREEN, BROOCH
WORK EXHIBITED:
SCHMUCK - IHM (DE), PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE (DE), GALERIE DE ZAAL (NL), MAD - THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN (USA), GALLERY FUNAKI (AU), THE DOWSE ART MUSEUM (NZ), OBJECTSPACE (NZ)
From the 'silver screen' of cinema, to computer and television, to the screen of smart phones, Kino looks at the screen as an ambiguous embodiment of entertainment, human desire and consumption. A short film, a screen made from fine silver ‘pixels’, and a brooch made from the conflict minerals gold and tantalum and e-waste recovered from smartphones’ touchscreens, together reflect on these notions.
We carry these minerals in our pockets, as they form the foundation for functioning electronic devices, our mobile phones above all. The brooch, at once reflective and transparent, subtly points to this aspect: We can see through it, but it also shows our reflections, implicating us in a material system based on demand, extraction, supply, and consumption, and whose exploitative mechanisms are very hard to control, let alone escape.
2020
ANIMACY
DUO SOLO EXHIBITION; OBJECTSPACE (NZ)
The increasing use of digital display technologies, exposes us to considerable amounts of blue light outside normal daylight hours, challenging our circadian rhythms. This exposure affects our biological system, that of plants and animals. For Animacy, the intention is to investigate this particular blue light, its agency and materiality, and to offer an immersive embodied experience in the context of display.
Photo credits: Sam Hartnett and Objectspace
2014
de·cor de·cor
DUO SOLO EXHIBITION; GALERIE DE ZAAL (NL)
dé·cor dé·cor, is a playful sound with a challenging heritage; many are the associations that come to mind when hearing the word ‘decor’: from home decoration to glossy lifestyle magazines, something superficial and a bit of a cliché perhaps; it is the intention to reclaim this word and expand its definition, presenting the viewer with ‘decorative objects’ that are imbued with complex material narratives and that are highly experimental from a craft and technological point of view, despite their minimal and subtle appearance.
Photo credits: Jan-Willem Groenendaal and galerie de zaal
2013
TENDENSER · TENDERNESS
EXHIBITION; GALLERI F15 (NO)
Over the course of the past four decades, the exhibition series Tendenser (Tendencies) has been held at the Galleri F15 in Moss, Norway. The purpose of this ongoing project is to gather together the most recent, inventive craft work in the Nordic Countries. Curator for the 40th edition of Tendenser is Glenn Adamson.
Participants: Gunnel Wåhlstrand, Mia E Göransson, Marie Torbensdatter Hermann, Karina Nøkleby Presttun, Caroline Slotte, Fredrik Ingemansson, Nicolas Cheng, Pernille Braun, Beatrice Brovia, Maja Gunn, Miro Sazdic Löwstedt and Hanna Hedman/Sanna Lindberg.
2017-18
DON'T STEAL THE KIL
FINE SILVER, WOOD, SLAG, STONE, IRON, GLASS
WORK EXHIBITED:
RIAN DESIGNMUSEUM (SE), KONSTHANTVERKARE (SE)
During 2017-18, I have collected, gifted, stole, remade and unmade, returned doorstops from different locations. The doorstop known for its ability to misplaced or become misbehave. It denotes the possibility that unnoticed things can act and how these objects able to disrupt or alter productive spaces — keeping certain doors open, or disappearing from where they should be, thus disturbing our expectations. Through the work Don’t Steal The Kil, I have observed how the material objects placed on different locations take on meaning beyond their relational context — it moves from abandoned site to museum space, morphing from neglected things to ornament.
2016-17
FROM LANDSCAPE TO TIMESCAPE
TROMPE L’OEIL, SILVERWARE, SERVING TRAY, FLOOR/GROUND, PENDANT, MATERIAL FICTION
WORK EXHIBITED:
RIAN DESIGNMUSEUM (SE), EASY!UPSTREAM (DE), KONSTHANTVERKARE (SE)
From Landscape to Timescape, trompe l’oeil patterns of materiality near and far, tend to blur their identity and origins, thus blurring the notion of distance and aesthetic value. The near and the far raises the question: how do our material perceptions and cultural perspectives change and respond to authenticity with the dichotomies between global and local, material norms and virtuality? I refer to these works as material frictions as well as material fictions, in the attempt to analyse what lies on the material surface as much as through the layers of history.
2016-18
GOLD RUSH
CONVERSATION PIECE, PENDANT/BROOCH, E-WASTE, GOLD, MYLAR, KAPTON
WORK EXHIBITED:
PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE (DE), STEDELIJK MUSEUM‘ S-HERTOGENBOSCH (NL), NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DECORATIVE ARTS AND DESIGN, TRONDHEIM (NO), GALLERY FUNAKI (AU), OBJECTSPACE (NZ), KUNSTNERFORBUNDET (NO), RIAN DESIGNMUSEUM (SE)
Our desire for and power of consumption of always better, more updated electronic goods, combined with the producers’ own interests in pumping out consumer electronics with an embedded expiry date, result in huge amounts of waste from the over-production and over-consumption of electronics.
Gold together with other minerals, is at the base of their functionality, it is diluted into what we consume and interact with carelessly, hidden into the secret workings and mechanisms of our appliances and daily interactions with them. By extracting gold and other precious metals from electronic waste, and rendering these visible on the body through jewellery pieces meant to adorn, the intention is to understand gold's cultural meaning and power in our time.
2011
FAÇADES
CONVERSATION PIECE, MARBLE, PINK ONYX STONE
WORK EXHIBITED:
DESIGN MIAMI/BASEL (USA/CH), TRIENNALE DESIGN MUSEUM (IT), GALERIE NOEL GUYOMARC'H (CAN), GALLERI F15 (NO), GALERIE DE ZAAL (NL), KORU 5 (FI), KONSTHANTVERKARE (SE)
Façades started off in a marble quarry when, confronted with the vertigo of the mountain, and with the unsettling sublime of the landscape being relentlessly cut-up and modified by the human intervention. Façades is a work that challenges notion of scale through the jewellery medium, and explores nature in its crude simplicity as well as the interference human-nature. It reflects on the coexistence of artifact and nature, where these are juxtaposed, sometimes integrated, rather than opposed; on the mechanisms of identity fabrication - unavoidable and indispensable - as it is the need for ornament.
2015
TERROIR
SILVER NAPKIN, TABLEWARE, DAMASK TABLECLOTH
WORK EXHIBITED:
CULTURAL EMBASSY AMSTERDAM (NL)
Terroir looks at notion of distance and sets out to explore mechanisms and geographies of commodity from near-faraway. The damask tablecloth, cutlery and silver napkin coded with socio-economic production and material meanings in a dining setting, become metaphors to symbolise and discuss dissolving locality, region of origin and sense of place.
2014
BEYOND REPAIR
CONVERSATION PIECE, RÖRSTRAND, ALF WALLANDER, WALDEMAR LINDSTRÖM, EMILE GALLÉ, ART NOUVEAU
WORK EXHIBITED:
GALERIE DE ZAAL (NL), BUKOWSKIS (SE), CHEONGJU CRAFT BIENNALE (KR), KONSTHANTVERKARE (SE)
Beyond Repair is an investigation in material and technological culture, as well as exploring the issue of “value” (emotional, material, economical & cultural) of an artifact both in a museum and in an everyday context: when is an object beyond repair? How to intervene upon it so that it can benefit its user/viewer again? An object is also made of memories conferred upon it by society or by an owner, it has a power as a storyteller that transcends its functionality.
2012-14
OBJECT OF VERTU
CONVERSATION PIECE, FINE SILVER, WALL PIECE, A4 SILVER MIRROR, 21CM X 29.7CM, VANITY MIRROR, JEWELLERY BOX
WORK EXHIBITED:
DESIGN MIAMI/BASEL (USA/CH), GALLERI F15 (NO), GALERIE DE ZAAL (NL), Z33 (BE), GALERIE PHOEBUS ROTTERDAM (NL), KONSTHANTVERKARE (SE)
"I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over."
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
Object of Vertu is thought of contemporary silver objects of the everyday, inhabiting our surroundings and offering themselves to a more direct and subtle interaction. The final mirroring silver objects with reference to the standardised proportions of an A4, awaits to be filled in with reflected contents.
2012-13
CHINOISERIES
CLOISONNÉ, HOLLOWWARE, STAINLESS STEEL, INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL, DISSOLVING
WORK EXHIBITED:
DESIGN MIAMI/BASEL (USA/CH), GALERIE CAROLINE VAN HOEK (BE), PAD PARIS (FR), GALERIE DE ZAAL (NL), ASIA SOCIETY (HK), KONSTHANTVERKARE (SE),
SINGAPORE NATIONAL DESIGN CENTRE (SG)
Chinoiseries – a group of hollowware pieces made in part using cloisonné, a metal enamel technique that spread in Asia after the 14th century, and that was developed in China during the Ming Dynasty – I re-examined the term ‘chinoiserie’ as a recurrent idea and imagery rooted in the eighteenth-century European fascination of East Asian cultures. The research work was situated in one of the last surviving cloisonné enamel workshops in Beijing.
2011
ON THE DOORWAY
CONVERSATION PIECE, DOOR HANDLE, SELF-OTHER
WORK EXHIBITED:
DESIGN MIAMI/BASEL (USA/CH), TRIENNALE DESIGN MUSEUM (IT), GALLERI F15 (NO), SAINT-ÉTIENNE DESIGN BIENNALE (FR), GALERIE DE ZAAL (NL)
A small domestic hardware that have intrinsic jewellery qualities and more than one affinity with it. If we consider the domestic space as a body, we might start to look at these objects, door handles to be more specific, as appendixes, small organs creating an anticipation of the space that discloses behind the door. Despite being fundamental components in the domestic landscape, they stand on the doorway, ready to open but also seclude, allowing an access or impeding it.
Materials, junctures, mechanisms are thought of as for jewels and, as jewels, the final objects become something to be taken care of: fragile, delicate and colloquial. The door handles are thought of as jewels; each object has its complementary on the other side of the threshold, together reflecting on the dichotomies between private-public, familiar-uncanny, inner-outer, self-other.
2016
(IM)PRINT
CO-CURATED EXHIBITION; MUNICH (DE)
The co-curated exhibition (IM)PRINT presents works that address different interpretations of the acts of publishing and disseminating, but also of imprinting and impressing. Some of the works on display, investigate the similarity between jewellery and language or typography: how the former allows for potentially infinite configurations, functioning in this way similarly to an alphabet, whose ideal surface and interface for communication is the body and the surrounding space. Other positions bypass for a moment the physicality of jewellery and objects, and rather look at the role and practice of the artist as publisher, editor or producer.
Participants: Lin Cheung, David Clarke, Nicolas Cheng, Liesbet Bussche, Silke Fleischer, Beatrice Brovia, Hanna Hedman/Sanna Lindberg, Nils Hint, Göran Kling, Kajsa Lindberg, Yuka Oyama and Niels Van de Wouwer.
2013
LINERS
CONTAINER, COLONIAL BANKNOTES, TRADE, CURRENCY
WORK EXHIBITED:
BAYERISCHER KUNSTGEWERBEVEREIN (DE), GALERIE KULLUKCU (DE)
Liners is a direct interpretation of the exhibition theme:
Bucks (currency) and Barter (trade). It addresses the relationship between the two.
Through a history of ruled countries and rulers, goods and habits have been exchanged becoming ultimately familiar.
Money is something as abstract as the idea of value itself. An inked piece of paper on which the history and destiny of nations is recorded and inscribed. In the work Liners, made from former colonial banknotes that I had collected, I hand erased most references to the currency of the colonial ruler, revealing only the exotic imagery of the ruled country (depictions of fruit, local plants, and scenes of daily life). And let it be just — partly blank — paper. Only a handful of details in pastel colours remain visible at the bottom of the carefully fabricated pastry liners. The installation become containers of empty space between the past and the present, suspended on marble-white macarons (Liners I) and krokets (Liners II).
2017-19
NU JADE
CONVERSATION PIECE, JADE, INDUSTRIAL WASTE, E-WASTE, EMPATHY
WORK EXHIBITED:
PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE (DE), SCHMUCK - IHM (DE), ALCOVA (IT), DROOG DESIGN (NL), OBJECTSPACE (NZ), KUNSTNERFORBUNDET (NO), RIAN DESIGNMUSEUM (SE), NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DECORATIVE ARTS AND DESIGN, TRONDHEIM (NO)
In Confucius’s Book of Rites, jade was described as morality, justice, truth and earthy beauty. The work of Nu Jade, created from industrial waste – jade stone and motherboards, reflects on the apotropaic functions associated with materiality of jade: from notions of protection and concern with personal health, the Nu Jade series poses responsibility questions about who and at what costs industrial and electronic waste processing and environmental safety are carried out. Can this material, used for motherboards, be seen as a new jade, on which the value systems of our contemporaneity are based? Will it eventually become a hybrid rock – a fossil of our world – in a hypothetical future, when archaeologists will dig it up from the depths of the earth?
2013
BUCKS 'N BARTER
CO-CURATED EXHIBITION; MUNICH (DE)
The co-curated exhibition Bucks 'N Barter features works from nine international artists active in the fields of jewellery, craft, product and experience design, with site specific installations, newly commissioned works and a selection of thought-provoking pieces, all together investigating a complex and multifaceted topic, that of the human tendency to trade and exchange and how this has shaped not only the society we live in but also the way we perceive and relate to things and materials. Key themes touched upon are value and currency, material culture, barter and exchange in terms of economics, symbols, knowledge and cultures; the relationship between the market and the applied arts, between physical and virtual.
Participants: Hilde De Decker, Nicolas Cheng, Richard Elenbaas, Tzu Ling Lee, Kajsa Lindberg, Beatrice Brovia,
Katrin Spranger and Prang Lerttaweewit.
Scenography: Friederike Daumiller
Graphic concept: Daniela Wiesemann
2018-19
CRAFT REMEDIATION
PLACE MAKING, CARE, ECOLOGICAL REMEDIATION, POST-INDUSTRIAL
WORK EXHIBITED:
RIAN DESIGNMUSEUM (SE), BARKLUND & CO (SE)
Craft Remediation, is a site-responsive and hands-on permaculture approach for phytoremediation. It aims to discuss how the praxis of care can be understood in a craft context, and how a more empathic approach to materials and resources can be activated on a local scale. The idea of caring and harvesting are explored not only in a human encounter, but materialised and extended in dialogue with-non humans, particularly plants acquired from the neighbourhood of Aspudden, and technology used to measure the photosynthetic efficiency in plants.
The investigation started at Vinterviken in Aspudden, a post-industrial site where Alfred Nobel invented an enormous revolution for armaments and mining explosives manufacturing: dynamite. The side effect of the industrial activities in Vinterviken that started in the 1860's have led to soil contamination in the area. In response to this specific local history, the artistic research explores, among other ideas, harvesting as a method for extracting pollutants from contaminated soil.
The project as a whole, is an artistic and technological investigation that, through an evolving objects, jewellery, installation and interactions, starts a dialogue about a possible ecological remediation, having as its starting point an emotional response to the post-industrial landscape we live in today.
2020
SOMEBODIES
EX-VOTO, SILVER/LEAD, FICTION, RESISTANCE, ENTANGLEMENT
WORK EXHIBITED:
ENGELSKA MAGASINET (SE)
For hundreds of years the Reijmyre Glasbruk has produced many significant glassware, while at the same time accumulating some of the leftover reactants behind the factory and in nature. Bioaccumulation is a term that refers to the human-made compounds, progressively accumulated in a living organism. Through speculative storytelling and the reference to ex-voto, which suggests a deep concern with the body and healing. Somebodies responds to the historical context of the particular ruby red glass making process in Rejmyre Glasbruk, it is a narrative corresponding to slow violence and social vulnerability and it concerns with whose communities are exposed and constantly build resistance to contaminated bodies.
2010
THE BEAUTY OF NOTHINGNESS
BROOCH, LOOFAH, SISAL FIBRE, AMBER STONE
WORK EXHIBITED:
GALERIE ROB KOUDIJS (NL), GALERIE MARZEE (NL), TALENTE - IHM (DE), PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE (DE)
The Beauty of Nothingness, is consists of 15 pieces of jewellery explored with different sensitivity and insight and which is culminating in a coherent body of work. The pieces exists in a gray zone somewhere between nothingness and purity. Each piece, challenging us through the beauty itself but also through the uncanniness of the pieces. Materials I work with are bathing materials such as natural sponge, sisal fibre, loofah and cotton for cleaning up our body.
What does nothingness mean? It is void, silence, unpretentious modest, poetry, virtually invisible. If I relate beauty to nothingness, what happens? Is nothingness sort of an absence of beauty? Or it is portrayed by our culture and society, and, in such case, can I define this absence of beauty? Is it beauty that you cannot even catch? Is its appearance neutral, almost hidden?
Such unevocable sensations of beauty are extremely subtle and hard to acknowledge. One needs to train one’s eyes and go beyond the layers to discover the beauty of nothingness.
