With one foot rooted in crafts and folk art and the other firmly in the criticism of consumption, Johanna Törnqvist assembles traditional and contemporary expressions, while also raising questions about the valuation of today’s materials. In the borderland between art, crafts and fashion, she flirts with traditions and finds the gold grains in rubbish and waste materials. With skill and craftsmanship, she transforms them into something refined and beautiful that does not leave the viewer unaffected.
In Project Precious Trash, she takes a step further to partake in the contemporary debate about what we consume and how we look at our assets. Crafts have always been made out of natural materials; wool, clay and wood, but maybe today’s new material is the material that we never run short of; waste? In Project Precious Trash, Johanna Törnqvist raises questions about consumption and sustainability, and incisively creates a provocative contrast between the transience of the waste and the precision and resistance of the craft.
“In my work I explore the rules that we are surrounded by every day. The installation consists of many little objects that can be carried around the neck, in a pocket, in the hand, on a shirt. I make installations of small objects that work independently but are still an important part of a whole. The objects usually have a graphic, clear and symbolically charged expression. Together they follow a timeline, branching off in different directions. In my work I explore the rules that we are surrounded by every day and that we live by, such as the alphabet, money, measurements, numbers.
Material: Wood – sawn and sometimes dyed
August Sörenson: “I work in a ceramic tradition of figurative and imitative design and I am fascinated by the ability of pottery to be a utensil, a story and a material all at the same time. In the exhibition En Ding Ding Värld, I showed utensils that I designed and produced between 2006 and 2016 in my studio in Gustavsberg, Värmdö. The title of the exhibition alludes to the absurdity of these encounters and the human ability to interpret and understand with the help of humour.”
Material: Ceramic utensils
There is eternal beauty in simplicity, but simplicity can also hide what is lacking in content and meaning. Love Hultén fills his simplistic work with a living and magical content that fascinated him as a child. Hultén works with electronics down to their smallest components, and with materials that develop a patina without regular maintenance or daily care. He thereby prolongs the life of devices that are otherwise the essence of disposables. Everything is produced, assembled and decorated in Hultén’s little workshop in Gothenburg.
Materials: Wood, brass, plastic, electronics
Equipment: LCD screen, 8-way joystick, processor, batteries. Space for 10,000 games
