Ann Wåhlström

"I love playfulness, but at the same time I think decorations should be used sparingly. The playfulness is expressed in spirals and additions. The expression in the Cyclone series is the essence of myself. The spirals are sweeping and definite in the meeting of the colour and the glass," explains Ann Wåhlström, who was `discovered´ by Kosta Boda when her hand-blown studio glass was presented at a gallery in Soho, New York, in 1985. A longing for fragility inspired the simple glass bubbles with soft concavities. Born in 1957. Designer at Kosta Boda since 1986 with a studio at the Kosta glassworks.

Ever since she took up her career as a glass designer at Kosta Boda, Ann Wåhlström has moved fluently between various sources of inspiration, just as she commutes between her studio at the venerable Kosta glassworks and her home in Stockholm. During one period of her career she produced a series of stunning architectonic pieces; in another, she gave pride of place to the forms and colours of nature. Now, after seashells, fish and aquatic creatures have become her chief source of inspiration.

"I got the idea for my new black-and-white pieces from an enormous whale shark I saw in a documentary on undersea life," explains Ann Wåhlström. "The fantastic markings on its body seemed totally chaotic yet strangely ordered, something I felt I had to translate into glass..."

It was thus that her limited edition Whales took shape. A spontaneous, speckled elliptical form with a motley decoration of spots and stripes, based on a boldly conceived original, was developed after much experimentation in the blowing room. Whales was first shown in Stockholm in autumn, 2001, along with seahorses, shells and spiral shapes collectively themed under the heading of `Black and White´. In 2002, the show will be moving on to Australia.

Ann Wåhlström first showed her linear vases and sculptures - seahorses, shells and shore life - at her one-woman show `Blue Shells, Green Seahorses´ in 1993. For this series, she had found her inspiration during the early nineties on a beach near Sydney, where she stumbled across a colony of transparent blue jellyfish - `bluebottles´, or Portuguese men-of-war - that had been washed ashore and lay glistening in the sun. Their shape and colour inspired a whole new world of soft sea creatures in glass. Later during the nineties, her wanderings along the shore were to provide the inspiration for several more shows on the same theme.

"The shapes of nature, from seashells to the ingeniously surreal `functionalism´ of sea creatures, are unparalleled when it comes to exciting design ideas," says Ann Wåhlström, who stylises rather than depicts. In these pieces, Ann Wåhlström has created a highly personal marine landscape, in which art glass and production series go hand in hand. "I like to borrow ideas from my more complicated pieces, simplifying and adapting where necessary, so that my everyday glass can be produced as easily as possible," she says.

An excellent example is Hot Pink, a series of vases and bowls whose coloured layers of pink, blue and yellow shimmer and shine beneath the solid undulate surface of the glass. Hot Pink was honoured with the prestigious Excellent Swedish Design award in 2000.

Another highly successful series is Cypress, handsome, gleaming candlesticks and an accompanying votive in white and clear glass that made their first appearance in spring 1994. This, too, was awarded an Excellent Swedish Design prize. Autumn 2001 sees a new addition to Wåhlström´s Look series in the form of an exclusive smoke-grey bowl. With its hand-cut décor, the new bowl is an elegant complement to the amber and black champagne glasses.

After studies at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Ann Wåhlström continued her design education at the Pilchuck School, outside Seattle, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She worked under the tutelage of American glass artist Dale Chihuly, who served both as her teacher and personal mentor. She was `discovered´ by a Kosta Boda executive during a trip to New York in 1985 - studio glass she had blown herself was being shown in a Soho gallery. By that time, she and her husband, an American and also an artist, had been living and working in the U.S.A. for several years.

Wåhlström now yielded to the temptation of working with glass on a grander scale and began designing for Kosta Boda, dividing her time between New York and Sweden. Working with the glassworks´ skilled craftsmen, she gradually carved out a new role as designer and artist.

In 1999, in celebration of Ann Wåhlström’s 20 years in the service of molten glass, Smålands Museum - Sweden´s Museum of Glass - staged a retrospective exhibition of her work. This was `Cyklon - Glass in Motion´, which later moved on to Svensk Form in Stockholm and the FORM/Design Centre in the southern city of Malmö. The show also marked the first appearance of her gracile Soap Bubbles and Cyklon, both of which were produced in limited editions.

Her soap bubbles are tall, drop-shaped vases, essentially sculptures, in a range of soft colours. The soft, gently rounded indentations were produced by the glassblower as he quickly drew in his breath while the glass was still on the blowing iron. Ann herself says that in designing these pieces she sought to re-explore the essential fragility of the glass bubble. "Here, it was a matter of identifying the basic form - the simplest form of all, the one I´m always looking for."

In 1999, in celebration of Ann Wåhlström’s 20 years in the service of molten glass, Smålands Museum - Sweden´s Museum of Glass - staged a retrospective exhibition of her work. This was `Cyklon - Glass in Motion´, which later moved on to Svensk Form in Stockholm and the FORM/Design Centre in the southern city of Malmö. The show also marked the first appearance of her gracile Soap Bubbles and Cyklon, both of which were produced in limited editions.

Her soap bubbles are tall, drop-shaped vases, essentially sculptures, in a range of soft colours. The soft, gently rounded indentations were produced by the glassblower as he quickly drew in his breath while the glass was still on the blowing iron. Ann herself says that in designing these pieces she sought to re-explore the essential fragility of the glass bubble. "Here, it was a matter of identifying the basic form - the simplest form of all, the one I´m always looking for."