Frida Peterson - 2024

This year's Roos grantee is Frida Peterson, who created an artistic mixed form consisting of a wild flora of artistic and less artistic materials that she treats with great respect. Perhaps one can guess that her knowledge of the arts and crafts constitutes an important dimension, a slowness that calls for reflection. However, it would be wrong to claim that Frida Peterson's artistry would only be craft-based. In her work there is also a conceptual dimension. Her art approaches questions that oscillate between aesthetic and spiritual reflections, which are common in contemporary art.

This applies not least to her graduation exhibition from the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm in 2023, where she let a flock of birds from Skeppsholmen's fauna take over the exhibition space with her peculiar choreography. The spirits also invaded her ingenious reconstruction of Sigurd Lewerentz's iconic brick altar from Klippan's church. It also came to articulate the relationship between nature and culture as one of the great destiny issues of our time. We warmly welcome Frida Peterson to challenge Artipelag's identity.

IN CONVERSATION WITH FRIDA PETERSON

Adam Rosenkvist: Congratulations on the Fredrik Roos scholarship! A common thread in your works is that they seek elusive aspects of existence in the familiar and everyday, and in nature. I feel that the works playfully close the distance between earthly life and the great unknown, until only a thin, almost imperceptible membrane separates them. I am particularly thinking of your graduation exhibition, The Holy Spirit. In it, a flock of curious birds, made of papier-mâché and fabric, strolled around a full-scale copy of Sigurd Lewerentz's altar for Sankt Petri church in Klippan. How did you find this theme?

Frida Peterson: Thank you! I am so very happy and honored. My thesis came about through parallel impulses. First of all, I am very fond of birds. During my master's I spent a lot of time walking around central Stockholm. During the winter months, I used to stop and drink coffee at a feeding station opposite the Royal Palace and watch as ducks and waders partied. For me, watching birds is triggering. They are present, corporeal, often close and at the same time inaccessible. Seabirds move on the border between worlds: the water, the sky and a feeding station at the castle.

In Sigurd Lewerentz's church in Klippan, the lampposts stand with bent necks and bow slightly. The altar is as big as a thick carpet and built in a functionalist style – an altar that must fulfill a function and it too is on the border between worlds. Before I started my master's I lived in Malmö and had some kind of crisis. Or maybe not a crisis, more a time of boredom and inactivity. Maybe I was starting to feel old, or like a confused artist. When my grandfather passed away, I went to Böda church on Öland to listen to the soul ringing.

Böda is a small rural town with a shortage of priests, so the service was held instead by an old pilot. I enjoyed his sermon and thought about what I would talk about if I had the chance to preach. Some years later, I contacted priests in Malmö and had studio conversations. Like Lewerentz's lampposts, I had been struck by a longing to bend my neck a little and I became curious. A source of inspiration for my graduation exhibition was also Giotto's fresco Sermon on the Birds (executed ca. 1297–1300, ed. note), which depicts Francis of Assisi preaching to a group of birds.

Adam Rosenkvist: The studio conversations with the priests must have given many unexpected angles to your practice. It is also so obvious that you have studied the everyday comedy of the birds: how they move, gesture and relate to each other as a group - almost like a Bruno Liljefors painting in sociological vintage! As I have looked more closely at your sculptures, I have noticed that you constantly emphasize the stitches, the brush strokes and the materials. You thereby underline the creation process of the works and the handwork they have emerged from.What does your process look like? And what knowledge is in the hand?

Frida Peterson: In my work, I like monotonous movements a lot. When I learned to knit many years ago, I was told that the trick was to find a rhythm and not focus on the single stitch. One movement must in a self-confident way give power into the next and only when you have found the rhythm will it be good and the work will then knit itself. It is such a good description of many craft techniques and runs through almost everything I do. My background is in textile craft, which I have studied for many years. In recent years I have worked with a greater variety of materials than just textiles, but I think I have brought the pace of these techniques with me. Because when I reach that rhythm, my head is empty and I can work for as long as I want. My process often starts with me getting hooked on something. It can be something I find beautiful, interesting or that tingles. And then I think I should work on something completely different. Something more thought out and well planned. But it doesn't work. This, combined with the fact that I find a material and a technique that feels stimulating, means that I start working.

I think I work a bit like a weaver. The weaver builds his image from the bottom up, much like drawing a picture from one side to another. I don't really know how the composition or the whole will be until the end. One thing leads to another and slowly a mood, a theme, a scene is born. It's so hard to create something that feels like it's still alive when it's finished. Sometimes when I've planned a piece of art in advance and execute it according to plan, I can be hit with the feeling of having held something alive and warm in my hand , but that on the way I have squeezed the life out of it. The starting point overcomes the work. I feel that I come closer to something alive if the idea feels embarrassingly unclear when I start and I sometimes try to understand what it is. I want to continue to look at it with wonder and not as an illustration of a process that is already over.