Wondrous Strange: Women Redefining Scandivanian Glass.

Scandinavian design has long been prized for its sleek aesthetic, bold primary colors and nononsense utilitarianism. The glassmaking traditions in Sweden, Norway and Denmark were no exception; centralized craft schools such as Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Sweden and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art Design School in Bornholm produced makers whose legendary precision was a testament to the rigors of their technical training. As the dominance of the 1950’s modernist movement waned, this region experienced the birth of a studio movement that decentralized glassmaking. New expressions in glass were able to emerge – but were still in large part fettered by a common, almost morally-based aversion to embellishment. It is only relatively recently that Scandinavian glassmakers have begun to step away from the canonical purity of design that so characterizes their region and embrace the intentional eccentricity of mixed media, kitsch and performance-based work in their product offerings. The Scandinavian women profiled here are finding ways to synthesize their hard-won technical skills with unique methods of personal expression. The results are smashing stereotypes and redefining the very idea of “product” in our changing world.

Karen Nyholm lives and works in the picturesque seaside town of Ebeltoft, Denmark. In walking distance from the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft as well as the studios of Steffen Dam and Micha Karlslund, both of whom influenced her path as an artist. Nyholm started blowing glass in 1998, at first focusing chiefly on tableware and functional items like the ones she was trained to make during her education at Bornholm. “Functional products are how glass started for me,” she notes – at the beginning of her career, even pieces that were not strictly functional were based upon the idea of a bowl or vessel.

Her experience interning for Dam and Karlslund provided her first glimpse of artmaking outside of the structure of school. Dam, an autodidact, had a wildly different process from anyone else she’d seen blow glass. “He was a tool maker – self taught, just fascinated by glass. Already that early on in my glass career, I had rules that you use the tools in a certain way, you put them on the bench in a certain way – but Steffen does things his own way, and that worked for him!” Karlslund came from a more formal glass background, but it was her intuitive artmaking process and her layered use of imagery that most stuck with the young artist – along with the couple’s inspiring way of living and working together.

In 2003, Nyholm attended what she describes as the “super-session” at Pilchuck Glass School that followed the GAS Conference in Seattle. A class with Kiki Smith and Dante Marioni was her first experience seeing sculptural glass. “In Denmark, no one was working with glass like that at that time, and it opened up this whole new world of what the material could do.”

With her strong framework in technical glassmaking, Nyholm was able to take this fresh inspiration back home and start innovating in her own practice. Bornholm had provided her with “an introduction to a lot of different techniques – stained glass, sand casting, blowing, pate de verre.” She began building and layering those techniques to make distinctive, more personal works. “Because hot glass is such a difficult material, you have to have rules to be able to make anything in glass. But for me, the better I am at making glass, the more I can break the rules.”

She relied on that structure in the hectic years of starting a family – and credits days of making her jewel-toned decanters with preserving her sanity during the demands of early motherhood. The ability to turn off her brain, keep her skilled hands active and end the day with a kiln full of beautiful objects was a reward unto itself. She emphasizes that what kept her motivated was her love for making, a passion for shape and color and being creative. “I still like the products – I especially like making the products – but when I make them, I’m a craftsperson, and when I’m making my sculptural work, that’s when I’m an artist.”

Now that her children are more independent, Nyholm has had time to return to making more personal work. A recent exhibition at the Glassmuseet by the arch-weirdos of the glass world, the De La Torre brothers, was fresh inspiration to push the boundaries in her practice. “Their work – it’s not pretty, it’s not glassy, it’s all over the place and I love it. In Danish glass, everything is supposed to be nice – nice shapes, nice colors – so there’s such freedom in their way of making.” Nyholm’s studio has an attached gallery boutique where she gets immediate feedback on new ideas – and she considers that immediacy a double-edged sword. Some of her favorite works explore the importance of death as a part of life, inspired by Day of the Dead imagery and the connections within our bodies. Skulls, brains and anatomically correct hearts in vivid colors provoke extreme reactions both negative and positive in her audiences. “It varies – some people are disgusted, but others . . .get it. They see the beauty in the contrast.”

Written by Jennifer Alexis Hand for GAS

Kitsch and Cosmos

The glass art of Karen Nyholm Karen

Nyholm’s work shifts between an aesthetic direction and a more poetic/playful universe.

The aesthetic is the result of a sublime understanding of color, surface and a sensual inspiration from nature. Simultaneously, there is a playful narrative in the works, when a small porcelain cat confronts the image a snarling panther or Bambi steps onto a frozen lake.

Her work addresses various themes- form and color, fantasy and play, life and death. Themes which in each their own way refer to her own life, with references to the familiar, love, family, childhood, birth and death.

Fantasy and play is apparent in sculptural form as the porcelain cat in the double bowl and as kitsch fantasy-islands, reminiscent of snow domes. With these sculptures Karen Nyholm reflects upon childhood play and children’s colorful and decorative aesthetic. The porcelain figures or applied glass details in strong colors are both a surprise and a disturbing element that subverts the style of the glass, putting the narrative in focus. A fanciful narrative staged in a mature aesthetic. In this realm Karen Nyholm references pop art, Disney and the eclectic mix of postmodernism.

In other works, skulls appear in the centers of flowers in the neat Rococo decorations. The resulting contrast reveals the flipside of fertility and life. With death on the agenda, her works reference the baroque theme of life’s transitory nature, fragility and decay- a symbolism that also underlines glasses particular materiality where the most precious can be seconds from obsolescence.

The narrative and the figurative element have decisive importance for Karen Nyholm’s work. It is in the narrative as it unfolds through an eclectic mix of motif, form, figurines and materials that an extra meaning occurs. Which, according to Karen Nyholm, is the essence of her work.

Consequently, tales arise which both attract and challenge us with an exposed femininity, imagination and harmonious form-sense. Kitsch and good taste meet here in a dance which invents new steps for figurative glass art.

Anna Lindskrog, proprietor of ArtCommunication, cand. mag.