O U T S K I R T S
We Work
in a Fragile
Material
S T O R Y B Y
David Sokol
“Now what?” is the perennial refrain of
any recent university graduate. But for the
budding glassmaker or ceramist who must
look forward to the unenviable tasks of
finding studio space and signing distribu-
tors, among myriad postcollegiate under-
takings, this question is especially nagging.
“When school’s over,” explains Linus
Ersson, a Stockholm-based thirtysome-
thing whose whimsical pieces include flow-
erpots balancing crowns of porcelain me-
ringue, “you’re just a lonely artist struggling
on his own.”
Advice and social contact would explain
why more than 30 young Swedes joined
Ersson at a series of get-togethers orches-
trated by Sara Isaksson From and Asa
Jungnelius in
2002.
From and Jungnelius,
both recent graduates of Konstfack Uni-
versity College of Arts, Crafts and Design
in Stockholm, wanted to recreate the
fraternity of the school’s glass and ceram-
ics department.
Jungnelius, whose oeuvre subverts mo-
tifs of femininity with sexually suggestive
and fur-clad sculptures, warped stilettos
and other glass pieces, notes that she and
From also suffered the spiritual isolation of
having no single discipline to call their own.
“Craftspeople were working in another,
more material-based tradition,” she recalls.
“We made objects that commented on the
functional world, but we didn’t make func-
tional objects. It was more related to
contemporary art or fashion or music.” For
these inaugural meetings the pair invited
classmates who, they assumed, felt the same.
Over the course of the year, the motley
group naturally diminished in size, so other
colleagues were recruited, and in 2003
From held a dinner at her edge-of-Stockholm
apartment to officially launch what has
become the design collective We Work in
a Fragile Material.
The nine members of
w w i a f m
clicked
immediately. All graduates of Konstfack,
they were the misfits of their fields. Frida
Fjellman, for example, creates alternate
universes in which hyperrealistic glass and
ceramic animals romp among miniature
volcanoes that look ripped from a science
fair. Jakob Robertsson applies a rougher-
hewn approach to reality, rendering indus-
trial objects and furniture imperfectly
in clay. Ceramist Pontus Lindvall’s surreal
artworks, meanwhile, may be better deci-
phered through intensive psychoanalysis.
Initially they organized group exhibi-
tions, with each member’s oddball perspec-
tive on bare display. Then, in 2004, the
arts center of Tensta, a suburban outpost
of Stockholm largely populated by non-
Swedish-speaking immigrants, and the art-
ist collective Oda Projesi invited
w w i a f m
IVe showed in a very gentle w ay how we all
work or think alone, and then we come together
W W IAFM
Below and opposite
bottom left: Members
of the Swedish Design
Collective We Work
in a Fragile Material
created
Mànscnnàla 20
t,
a large-scale marbleized
canvas, shown at
the Crystal Palace in
Stockholm in 2008.
and dance.— Frida Fjellman,
