|
For some inscrutable reason, the cyclical migrations of lemmings ceased during the early 1940s and this meant that predators such as arctic foxes and snowy owls could no longer count on a banquet and a large family every fourth year. Were there going to be plenty of lemmings this year? There seemed to be indications of this in the spring. The experts are, at any rate, agreed that 2001 was a lemming year worth noting and, as chance would have it, this was the year in which Frida Fjellman reached a larger public with her intense winter landscape Isfrid [Serene Ice]. A number of nervous lemmings have temporarily left their round, grass-lined winter homes beneath the snow, closely monitored by snowy owls and stoats which are probably hungry. It is cold, just as it should be on the winter slopes. The willow bushes are covered with ice and look as though they are made of glass. The situation is educationally precise, I now realize, but at the time, in my total ignorance, I was perplexed as to what the guinea pigs were doing among the little white igloos roofed with a tangle of transparent glass threads.
One Big Bang later, followed by an evolutionary process that is still in progress, Frida Fjellman has proved herself to be one of our more interesting craft-based sculptors – a poetic “infotainer” – who is also beginning to lay claim to grander spaces. She consistently works at combining two fascinating and complex subject-worlds and sign systems; on the one hand science and the manner in which science is presented in museums and, on the other hand, the funfair with its own special aesthetic which depends fundamentally on seductive lighting and colours that one wants to eat up. Linking the systems are Nocturnal Dreams, Glint, Other Place, Borderline….
One can often note a remarkably harmonious discourse pertaining to the sort of sculpture that Frida Fjellman works with, focusing on low and high status respectively but in which a distinction between subject and context seldom seems to be made. A stereotypical context, the tastelessly over-furnished home, for example, is allowed – beyond itself – to continue to influence the individual signs that have perhaps been mere visitors. Fjellman’s animals then unreflectingly become animals with low status since, as figurative items of ceramics and glass, they are united with everything that has ever collected dust on a narrow window ledge or a cheap chest of drawers. When did we jointly decide that this was to be the case? Liberated from this context – from the home – there is nothing low about the owl, the stoat, the hare, the marten or any of the other free spirits of forest and plain. Quite the contrary… Nor do all Frida Fjellman’s light sources need to be seen as cousins of old kitsch lamps but, rather, as elegant ways of illuminating her sets with a view to creating a fiction. Frida Fjellman has progressed on this contemporary mainstream on her own, reliable raft. Closely observed by beaver and muskrat she has been able to use her platform to act as Creator. On the first day some fully fledged owls were made that came to fill galleries. And Frida saw that it was good. After that came volcanoes erupting lava which created new territory. And that was almost even better. Then there were some other vigorous, furry animals and the cosmos and electrochemical plasma reactions as Saturday evening entertainment – followed by a rest on the couch though perhaps not on a Sunday. Frida Fjellman has cast her flashing lights onto dark waters and has launched anxiously radioactive cloud formations – and that is still not the totality of it. Sometimes in her carefully composed and multi-voiced scenes she has even managed to give expression to that most human condition: pure and simple hesitance.
Under cover of the night, a new and foreign being creeps around among those that we have got to know thus far. The long, red snout scents the atmosphere. What will happen now?
Thomas Laurien
|