- In my recent work, I have tried to put aside all questions on how to define craft, design and sculpture. Instead, I've focused on the creative joy and working out exactly what I want to do. It's easy to exaggerate the importance of putting a label on what you do, and, if you're insecure of what label to use, it's easy to see that as a problem instead of an advantage. This has been the perpetual issue of the Swedish arts and crafts scene for a while, and it's such an immense relief to just leave all that behind, says Frida Fjellman.
She shows a sketch of the curvy, sumptuous couch that she will be showing at Skokloster. - It seems like everything was so much more permissible back then. Decorating, going the whole hog, creating much more extreme things, says Frida. For her part, she tries to carry out her ideas without censoring, to exaggerate rather than tone down.
- I try to be allowing to myself, and in that way I maximise my own expression.
She admits that a lot of the objects in the castle are quite weird, made for no other purpose than showing off and proving that they could afford it. Her divan, on the other hand, is a modern version of "tender luxury".
- On an aesthetic level, it's my response to the baroque style, says Frida. She has previously combined rococo and 1950's in a table striving upwards on thin legs. By squeezing the shape together, it becomes more rotund and baroque, she explains in a line of argument relievingly detached from the chronology of art history. As soon as I saw the turning lathe in the uncompleted hall, it was clear to me that the legs of the divan had to be turned.
Frida's work often includes animals, and this one is no exception. The animal theme started off in connection with another castle. When the Art Museum of Västerås commissioned a group of sculptures, Frida chose to connect on to the castle surroundings, letting the ermine, the royal status symbol of the time, meet with field-mice, a badger and some large, brown-glazed ceramic owls. The kind of sculptures that used to have a high status, but later turned into kitsch and symbols of bad taste, were suddenly given a new form and a new context by Frida. She has observed an increasingly allowing attitude towards different expressions in arts and crafts, and in an extended sense, to different aesthetical values in general. Personally, she finds it interesting to work with animals that people normally don't think about.
- Animals can be strong symbols or just life-like depictions, depending on how and where they are placed, Frida says. People often project their own feelings on animals, letting the animals symbolise different states of mind.
When the Uppsala University Hospital (Akademiska sjukhuset) decided to renew the clinically white, fluorescent-lit examination room of the children's clinic, Frida placed ceramic owls and lemmings high and low in the rooms, giving the children a chance to discover new friends here and there. Even the brown-glazed little field-mouse found its place here, in an attempt to bring something earthy and a little ugly into the strict environment. In the meditation room of Huddinge Hospital, there is a different atmosphere. Multicoloured lights play softly behind glistening glass bulbs and clouds of glass float against a back-drop of soothing wall paintings in light turquoise and a warm shade of white. The room welcomes and comforts all those, regardless of faith, who are burdened by sombre questions and answers on life and death.
Lampwork is the name of the technique that Frida applies when, using a welding flame, she heats up thin glass tubes that she blows to bubbles, or shapes and assembles to form shimmering, fluffy glass clouds or fragile branches that glitter and sparkle in the light. She compares the slow and trying technique to knitting or embroidery, the assembling of something large through a series of small steps. Lampwork is an ancient technique, used in Venetian glass with its typical frills, and classic millefiori paperweights. Paired with modern electricity technique, Frida's glass work can result in neon lemmings that light up when they are touched, or bulging, orange lamps the shape of gas clouds, that are just as much sculptures as lamps.
- My recent work reflects my own weakness for objects that are so carefully crafted that they balance on the verge of the over elaborate. To me, that's a sympathetic kind of luxury, filled with tenderness - which is why I call it "tender luxury". Here, I see an interesting contrast to the collections at Skokloster - these objects are quite far from what I would call tender luxury.
In her studio in the old Film City in Solna, Frida is already starting to draw the outlines of coming solo exhibitions at Smålands museum (Swedish Glass Museum) in 2005 and Röhsska museet (Röhss Museum of Arts and Crafts in Gothenburg) in 2006.
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