Hanna Hansdotter

What is your background, how did you start with glass blowing?

— It’s really by accident that I started working with glass. I was 23 or 24 years old, working at a gas station in Oslo, when I visited my mom in her summer cabin. We watched a news story about glass blowing and I said “Okay, that’s what I’m gonna do.” It was completely random, but I knew I had to do something practical. It turned out that glass blowing suited me quite well because it requires a certain tempo. I’m quite fast and impatient, which the glass is too. We have matching qualities. Working with glass, it takes up all of your senses and you have to be fully present. Glass has a lot of limitations and conditions, it’s quite a complex process and environment. I think this complexity has always appealed to me. 

Could you tell us a bit more about the works in this exhibition? You present both sculptures and wall-hung works. 

— I’ve been working on the sculptures for a quite a few years now. I started developing the technique at Konstfack, where it also became clear to me that I like creating frameworks or conditions for production. It’s the same way sort of that I started working with sheet glass since about a year. I’ve tried translating the process and developing the same technique that I use when blowing glass, building a patterned iron lattice. Placing the glass sheet over it and heating it up, it sinks into the lattice and you end up with a tactile wall work. It’s still glass but it’s a completely different process, it’s not the hot shop process. But for me, it doesn’t really matter so much, I see this whole work with the glass like a journey and sometimes you just have to be along for the ride. It’s important to me that the process can steer where we’re going because I’m too indecisive. There’s so many decisions to make all the time and it can be very pleasant to let the process of the glass to show the way. I will show both the new and old techniques, and in the new works, the pattern becomes enlarged, it’s like a cut-out of the sculptures that I’ve worked with before. There’s a continuation of pattern, tactility, body and movement.

There is a lot of movement in your works, how do you work with colour and form in relation to it?

— Colour exploration and making glass appear in new ways that we haven’t seen before is always the goal. I silver coat a lot of objects, so it’s interesting to see how that technique can be taken to new levels as well. Then there’s the whole pattern exploration and for me it becomes a bodily presence in the objects that I like to have, a sense of movement. Maybe it’s an attempt to humanise these objects in some way, giving them more life. Stina Wollter talks about the body as an adventure of form. The body itself is so political, problematised and questioned. I really like how she talks about it also just being a form and a pattern, it’s such a good layer of looking at it. 

Could you tell us more about the technique and how you create these shapes?

— Mould blown glass is nothing new and blowing in iron moulds is something that’s been done before, but with a closed shape all objects become the same. I was trained in Kosta and Orrefors, so I have a very traditional glassblower background where the industry has shaped both my training and myself. The idea of repetition, production and tradition has imprinted on me from the start and it followed along when I started exploring the technique with the iron moulds. It’s a mix between free-blown and moulded glass where it swells through lattices with different patterns. 

Where do you find inspiration for your works? 

— It can be anything big or small, I’m very thrilled about the process and the techniques, that type of material exploration. Then, I’m also inspired by bigger questions, by people who do amazing things, artists, expressions, borderlands, clashing styles… I find inspirations in patterns, architecture, and bodies.