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OTHER PLACE
Frida Fjellman took her master´s degree, specialising in glass and ceramics,
at the School of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 1998. Quite early
in her career, she began creating landscapes of glass, ceramics and wood,
which she populated with various animals. One of her most important
techniques was lampworking, in which the artist heats thin glass rods with a
burner or torch and manipulates them into the desired shape.
Among her first projects was "Skogens Djur" ("Forest Animals"), exhibited at
the Västerås Museum of Arts in 2000. It was here that she first began using
animals as a motif, showing a sculptural group of animals that included a
badger, voles, ermines and a pair of owls. In this and other works, she used
her own objects as a means of commenting on the ways in which animals are
represented in the arts and crafts. Her sculptures recalled not only the
decorative china figurines used in so many homes to impart a sense of
domestic cosiness but also pointed to the importance of figurative ceramics
as a modern-day status symbol. She reflected on the unwritten rules of the
design and crafts world, which, based as they are on the stylistic ideals of
modernism, would preclude naturalistic 19th-century motifs such as
brown-glazed china owls before they even started to take shape in the
craftsman´s mind. "Figurative ceramics have long been associated with low
status, and for many people the worst conceivable object would be
brown-glazed owl," she explains. Since then, however, design and crafts have
moved on, and Frida Fjellman´s approach has become more direct.
"Permissiveness towards myself is my number-one starting point. I see myself
as working in a kind of personal gluttony, in my own aesthetic world and
what I´m a product of, whether I want to or not," she explains.
Frida Fjellman´s work regularly features Nordic animals which, though
widespread, have barely entered the public consciousness, especially those
which are considered ridiculous or not very pretty. Her interest in animals
is almost scientific, and she studies them with the utmost care before
attempting to give them shape. Each animal is more or less realistically
recreated in both size and detail, Here, she takes her inspiration from the
detailed representations of the natural world favoured by the national
romantics Ð one is reminded, say, of animal paintings such as "Uven djupt
inne i skogen" ("Eagle Owl Deep in the Forest"), painted by Bruno Liljefors
in 1895. Her animal studies and the settings in which she places them recall
the stage-like dioramas of natural-history museums. In fact, she is
fascinated with such museums, with their cases of stuffed animals and birds,
and pays frequent visits to the Museum of Natural History in Stockholm to
search out ideas for new projects. She is also in regular contact with the
curators, who enable her to study the stuffed animals in the museum archive.
It was at the Museum of Natural History that she was inspired to create the
lemmings featured in her "Isfrid" exhibition at Blås & Knåda in Stockholm in
2001. In the Museum´s freezer she found a small, unspectacular lemming that
she used as the model for the lemmings that later scurried across a bright,
white winter landscape constructed of sheet glass, glass bushes and ceramic
animals.
The exhibition was a continuation of "Forest Animals", and it was now that
the idea of landscape first took shape. Fjellman´s ambition was to create a
glistening winter scene infused with drama and a touch of the national
romantic; the overall effect was reminiscent of the winter paintings
produced by Gustav Fjästad in the early 20th century. "I wanted to show my
own version of the Nordic light and the blond, pure shapes of Scandinavia,"
she says. Now her landscape was no longer a mere set-piece; instead, the
animals had been incorporated in a three-dimensional context. Staging her
animals, she found them exposed to a natural drama in which the lemmings
were obviously vulnerable and made easy prey for the owls and ermines. Her
landscape became something of a natural theatre. Later, having provided
shelters for the animals in her landscape, she decided she needed one
herself and in the same year, 2001, created "Koja" ("Hut") of borosilicate
glass and silicon, which is now part of the collections housed at Smålands
Museum - Sweden´s Museum of Glass.
The animal and landscape motif appears from a literary perspective in the
"Borderline" exhibition staged at Stockholm´s Galleri Inger Molin in 2004.
Here Frida Fjellman picks up the role of animals in tales. Instead of a
landscape, she built up an entire environment featuring a large white hare,
a pine marten, glittering blue clouds floating in the sky, a wooden table
with a mirror surface, mushroom-like "gas cloud" lamps of various colours,
pools of mirror glass on the floor and mould-blown lemmings. That Frida
Fjellman has found much inspiration in "Alice in Wonderland" may be seen in
her white hare Ð equivalent to the White Rabbit which several times appears
during the tale to guide Alice on her journey through Wonderland. In
Fjellman´s case, the white hare first appeared during her time at the School
of Arts, Crafts and Design, when she was living in a house with a garden in
Solna, just outside Stockholm. For several years, a large old hare, rather
stiff in the joints, repeatedly came to forage in the garden and after a
while became a very special visitor. The white hare puts in regular
appearances in her work, most recently in "We Work in a Fragile Material"
shown at Skokloster Castle in 2004, and "Konceptdesign - tankens form"
("Conceptual Design - the Shape of Thought"), shown at the Nationalmuseum in
2005.
Fjellman is drawn to Alice because, in Wonderland, things are not what you
think they are and, indeed, are not expected to be. There are holes through
which one may pass and enter an entirely different world - Alice follows the
White Rabbit down the rabbit hole to find herself in Wonderland, where she
passes through several other holes as the wondrous tale unfolds. In Frida
Fjellman´s world, there is often a similar motif, suggestive of travel
through entrances and exits. The glass pools on the floor often appear to be
dark holes inviting us to enter. Just as in "Alice in Wonderland", Frida
Fjellman makes much use of mirrors and reflections; in the mirrors of her
tabletops and pools one sees oneself reflected from a new perspective.
Light and colour play an important role in Frida Fjellman´s work, and on
several occasions she has visited the U.S.A. for studies in neon (Pilchuck
School of Glass, 2003) and in glass and light (Pilchuck School of Glass,
2004). Her Lemming TV, created after attending a course in plasma neon at
Pilchuck, is a direct reference to popular culture - the lemmings, which
react by emitting a pulsating blue light when stroked, almost seem to be
characters in an animated film.
Animals and the natural world also frequently feature in Frida Fjellman´s
public commissions. At the Uppsala University Hospital, for example, ceramic
owls, lemmings and a vole have found their way into the children´s recovery
ward (2002). At the Johannelund elderly people´s residential centre in
Västerhaninge (2005) she has also worked with landscapes and animals,
decorating nine walls with various scenes from nature.
In her "Other Place", shown at Smålands Museum - Sweden´s Museum of Glass
(2005), two separate worlds are each other´s complement, one a world of
light and colour, the other a silent realm of shadows tempting us to spend a
while in contemplation, to pause for breath as we escape the daily round and
for a brief moment are engulfed in something different.
For Frida Fjellman it is important not to let trends get the upper hand. She
consciously strives towards the luxurious, the over-elaborate. She uses
glossy paints and exclusive materials, shunning the do-it-yourself objects
that have been "de rigueur" among young designers. An example may be seen in
the luxurious divan previously shown at Skokloster and in the
Nationalmuseum. "In my more recent works, I´ve given free rein to my
weakness for objects that are so carefully crafted that they border on the
over-elaborate. For me, this is a kind of sympathetic, gentle luxury," she
explains. As Jivan Astfalck notes in "Difference and Resemblance. The
reconstruction of signs" (Six views on a practice in change, Craft in
Dialogue, Stockholm, 2005), Frida Fjellman´s objects are hyper-decorative
and exploit the viewer´s sentimental weakness for such pieces. Whereas a few
years ago objects such as these could only have been produced in a spirit of
irony, Frida Fjellman´s approach to her work is strictly serious and their
decorative element cannot be denied.
With their scenographic, theatrical landscapes that dramatise the players
and lend atmosphere to the setting, the works of Frida Fjellman herald a
rejuvenation of craft exhibitions and the way in which craft is shown.
Inspired by the world of museum dioramas, she brings so much life to her
settings that the viewer becomes an integral part of the environment and the
usual distance between the visitor and the object on show is considerably
reduced.
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