At a time when we are witnessing an increasing discomfort with the über-slick design push in the crafts, it's quite refreshing to come across the work of an artist who has seemingly resolved (or perhaps just risen above) the interminable conundrum that is the arts-craft-and-now-design debate. Her Scandinavian background probably helps: she's born and bred to the aesthetic standard that our style-meisters and arts-industry apparachicks appear so perpetually determined to emulate—but there's nothing of the posturing imitator or slave to commodity here. Eschewing the craft sector's continuing angst over pedantic classification, Lunde concerns herself solely with the process of making. And within her practice, art, craft and design aren't competing disciplines but rather equivalent, integral elements of the whole. This isn't something she feels the need to loudly beat her breast about—it's simply an understood given. (Gosh—art, craft, design, common sense and humility. Could this be a sign of the contiguous link in craft's evolutionary chain?) But what Lunde most particularly manages to do is handle all the critical hot potatoes—concept, object, tradition, context, technique—with such a lightness of touch that she creates fine works of art that are at once familiar, accessible and relevant to even the least esoterically inclined.

One would have to surmise that her quite natural facility to connect all the dots has everything to do with both her personal characteristics (socio-politically engaged contemporary female) and the breadth of her formative influences—the Nordic heritage; the early European craft training (she studied for five years at various art schools, majoring in ceramics and glass, before a further three years of training at the Kosta Glass School in Sweden); the several years working for various glass artists across Scandinavia; the two years experience running a small production glass studio in Norway's north; and the periods of study at the ANU School of Art's Glass Workshop in Canberra—initially for a Bachelor of Visual Arts from which she graduated with first class honours in 2002, and finally her more recent return for a Masters of Visual Arts (from which she is just newly graduated).

Apropos the former (socio-politically-engaged-contemporary-female) it undoubtedly helped that the Norwegian craft fraternity had already succeeded in gaining the ‘freedom' of comparable status with the fine arts in terms of state funding and institutional respect (sans categorical bias). It comes as no surprise that she should espouse the cause of the influential ‘kunsthandwerk' movement of the 1970's which saw a ‘… paradigm shift in Norwegian arts and crafts…[when] applied artists stopped collaborating with designers and shied away from industrial production. They wanted to stop making things for the middle classes and start producing art for public spaces.'1 In ideological terms, the deliberate distancing from the formal restraint of the Scandinavian (or, more specifically, Swedish) design premise is entirely understandable and, might one even suggest, intellectually progressive. After all, how enlightening can it be to merely re-invent, over and over and over again, the already perfected Swedish wheel? Swedish design had initially been all about social engineering (with the hint of a Nazi philosophic underlay2) and the arbitration of ‘good taste'. (‘Elevating the taste of the common people would make them better human beings' – hmmm, what an extraordinarily offensive sentiment.) The decorative arts were deemed to be artificial and morally dubious,3 and vulgarities resoundingly execrated. So it's not at all surprising that a younger, radical generation would now be kicking over the traces of such an assiduously regulated sophistication—in perfectly understandable reaction to the aggressive consumerism and socio-political conservatism that currently dominates our day to day existence. (We don't yet see the same happening here, alas. The safely conventional, interior décor-focused practice of the equivalent young Australian glass practitioner, for instance, is perhaps a little concerning. Those courses in professional practice appear to have emasculated the innate creative counteraction/rebellion that has historically been the very life force of art history as we know it. Maybe it's time to cut out the bromide and kick-start the revolution….)

Northern Europe has consequently seen the development of ‘alternative' craft groups that reject the rampant individualism that drives modernist ideology, embracing instead a strong commitment to social/communal engagement; specifically manifest in the rise of community based activity. Lunde herself has worked on similar projects—with disabled children, with the blind, and with other like-minded practitioners. One particular collaboration, involving a group of Russian graffiti artists with a contemporary take on the tradition of the painted egg, exemplifies an increasing return to heritage and folk art (and to kitsch, even.) As Lunde explains, she, like many fellow artists, is ‘over the minimalism thing, actually. We want to celebrate the sexiness of life rather than a pretentious, snobby emptiness.' And this, in a nutshell, pretty much accounts for the irrefutable charm of her work. There is no forced cleverness here, nor supercilious posturing. It is both intelligent and warm, with a benign universality that quite genuinely touches Everyman.

This palpable generosity, and facility for inclusiveness, is especially evident in her most recent (Masters) work, Big Questions: Small Lives; an installation exhibited originally (at the end of January 2007) at the ANU School of Art Gallery, then immediately followed by an extended season (of a slightly abbreviated show) at the Kamberra Glass Gallery, Canberra. At an age when she is only too keenly aware of the biological clock—and the inevitable psychological pressures and social coercions that go with the territory—Lunde took advantage of the isolation and distance from home to sort objectively through personal baggage to investigate notions of the feminine self. Of particular interest were the implications of self-determination in the light of familial (and societal) expectation and obligation.

Lunde took as her central decorative device that prolific folk-art staple, the Russian Matryoshka doll—an extremely appropriate metaphor given the parameters of her thematic. Indeed these now common and internationally familiar dolls provide the perfect vessel for navigation into the realm of self, both contemporary and predestinate, signifying (regardless of their modest character) truths and imperatives profound in nature, motherhood, heritage and social and cultural interconnectedness. The repetition of elements, the sense of containment, the conjunction of traditions—all of this combines to provide a complexity as compounded as Lunde's subject itself. The nestling of the dolls literally encapsulates familial traits, from inherited character to the burdensome responsibility of generative duty and expectation. Each doll occupies a space defined by the shape of the preceding doll and, in the traditional Russian model at least, conforms faithfully to the decorative norm. Here the similarities end.

Lunde's blown glass dolls are large (up to 41cm in height), clear, highly skilfully executed facsimiles, and have been monochromatically detailed and decorated. It is clearly a black and white show, with shades of grey—in keeping with the subject matter itself, perhaps. None have faces, to better instil them with a sense of greater commonality. Using decals and/or engraving, Lunde has applied decorative motifs that appear traditional but, of course, deliver a surprising contemporary twist. Rather than mimicking Russian folk art painting, she has introduced the Norwegian equivalent, ‘rosemaling' (lit. rose painting), specifically the Telemark regional style practiced for generations by her own family (grandfather Sverre Lunde, most notably.) It was a tradition that began as an upper-class domestic decorative fad in c1750 when Baroque, Regency and Rococo styles of painting were introduced to rural Norway, and originally enjoyed high artistic standing. But it eventually fell from fashion by the mid-1800's, and has since devolved to the status of humble folksy handicraft, practiced customarily by women. (It is precisely this reliable feminine commitment to the maintenance of tradition that strikes a chord with Lunde.) She has augmented the rosemalesque engraving with decals of stylized Nordic flower, star and snowflake patterning, which on closer observation reveal themselves to be made up of multiple geometric configurations of the naked artist herself. Lunde's use of her (vulnerably naked) self is stunningly bold—and the intended irony of ‘decorative object'-as-decoration-on-the-decorative-object-representing-the-universal-mother-figure is certainly not lost on the viewer.

There are five sets of dolls in the exhibition, all with distinctive surface treatment. Some are dominated by larger, single-figured decals, pressed against the glass as though caught and confined by unyielding convention. On others these decals are sandblasted, to give a ‘ghostly sense of something lurking just under the skin'. Some have no decals at all, just etched outlines of the figure alone. And the largest group has been mirrored, drawing the viewer irresistibly to, and into, the artwork. On all, the decoration/engraving sits intentionally on the surface of the vessels, like a tattoo on the skin, in an interweave of the feminine and the domestic that finds the modern woman still draped in decorous display, diligently tuned to tradition even if irrefutably on her own terms. When all's said and done, Lunde's glass versions do remain instantly recognisable as the folk art object, but they have a transparent corporality that is at once arresting and revealing, and curiously elegant in a way that the dense, secretive wooden prototype could never be. In the glass, the delicate balance of strength and vulnerability remains the time immemorial constant, while the pattern of life itself dictates an intrinsic evolution, literally gravid with prospect and possibility.

To add further to the multi-layered effect, and in direct response to the (ANU School of Art) gallery space itself, Lunde introduced reflection, shadow and distortion to the mix. By projecting light through the glass she could throw enlarged shadows of the dolls, etchings and decals up onto the backdrop of gallery walls. She amplified this further by actually painting some of the shadows, much larger than life, in soft whispery greys, onto the walls themselves—achieving a sense of momentous (in)tangibility, of curious shift between reality, memory, and fantasy. The overall interplay between the 3-D, 2-D and real shadow was strangely affecting, giving the viewer an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland' notion of almost being able to step into the reflected space itself. But as in Alice's experience, the exhibition doesn't bring only lightness and joy. There is plenty of anxiety and apprehension to be discerned from the twist and loom of figures, should one's frame of mind be so inclined.

To further explore the feminine (and fecundity), Lunde extends the undertone of a darker thematic with work that sits apart from the groups of dolls. In a tight circle, twelve black amorphous forms lie motionless—the very density of the glass imparting an inkling of morbid portent. The title of this piece, The Spinning Wheel, alludes to the medieval practice of attaching revolving cots to the walls of convents (allowing a mother to place her child in the cot, spin the wheel, and leave unseen.) While it's a commentary in part on unwanted children, this rather sombre work also touches on the lottery of life, reflecting the cycle of monthly death and the perished hope of infertility. The surfaces of these ‘swaddled infants' have been lovingly engraved and painstakingly hand-lapped. Only the faces remain untouched; a shiny black mirror, conjuring unearthly overtones of the portal between life and death. But the delicacy of the ‘rosemale' engraving and the quiet beauty of each individual ‘pod' leavens the grave solemnity of the piece. Indeed, when the exhibition was moved to its second location at Kamberra, the logistics of the space could not accommodate the overhanging shadow play, and accompanying atmospherics. And the show became entirely benign, and almost (dare one say) domesticated. It became more accessible, in a way. And more overtly collectible.

We can only speculate what personal conclusions Lene Lunde may have drawn from her two-year odyssey. The fruits of her labours are beautifully crafted, incredibly desirable objets that far exceed the frumpy frau that the artist took as her starting point. Interestingly, the Matryoshka dolls themselves grew out of a push by a group of Russian artists who, in the 1890's, felt compelled to revive their own native culture and folk tradition—so it's really a rather sweet parallel. Nothing should stand in superior isolation, and we shouldn't become so rigidly sophisticated that we lose sight of the foundation of heritage that underpins it all. The interlacing of folk art, concept and skilled technique has combined with Lunde's highly cultivated design sensibility to make work that addresses issues far greater than the sum of the individual parts. We seem too anxious in the crafts to become generically contemporary, and banally ‘global'. But sophistication is really just a state of semantic artificiality. We ought, instead, to celebrate both our roots and aspirations with a good dose of respect for the humanity and warmth of the familiar. If we so choose.

Notes

Artist quotes from personal interview

1 See Jurunn Veiteberg's ‘ To use and being used by language: what craft means in Nynorsk (Norwegian) and the emergence of the ‘restless object' Craft Culture

2 See Sarah Kristofferson ‘ Swedish taste up for debate' Kunsthandverk 4, 2004

3 Ibid.

 

This article is presented in partnership with Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre.