Artists Ulrika Barr and Kristina Levén first met in 2017 while studying at Konstfack in Stockholm. They came across each other during a spontaneous project in the glass workshop and rapidly discovered the creative dynamics of being two. A sort of third arose out of their interpersonal dialogue. Thus was the artistic duo of BarroLevén born.
Glass has its own particular poetry: in the heat that has abated and the movement that has stilled. In the sand that can miraculously be transformed into transparent rock, filled with space and light. Paradoxically these seductively aesthetic qualities are also the Achilles heel of art glass, something that the artist needs to deal with very cautiously. BarroLevén are clearly aware of the insidious beauty and they do not remain on the surface. They want more than that.
Ever since the 1950s there has been a tradition of experimentation at the Boda glassworks. It was there that the then recent Konstfack graduate Erik Höglund challenged the long tradition of glassmaking. For example by throwing potatoes into the hot-glass melt in order to induce bubbles in the glass – entirely in contradiction to the previously “pure” ideal. Craft artist Monica Backström worked in the same spirit of conscious imperfection, introducing tacks, paper clips and other metal objects into the melt in order to “dirty” the glass.
It is in this context of traditional glassmaking and experimentation that BarroLevé work. Nor do they seek elegance or “purity”. Their glass can be both heavy and lumpy. For some time they have been experimenting with foamglass, a material that has been developed as a material for the construction industry. Foamglass is made from recycled glass which would otherwise be thrown away. The fragments of glass are ground to powder and a leavening agent is added. When heated, the material ferments to produce a cake that is reminiscent of lava.
In their experiments, BarroLevén contrast clear hot crystal at the glassworks with the raw, industrial product. Since foamglass causes new, unpredictable chemical reactions during production, every second can be decisive. Work demands both total attention and an efficient team. If luck is against one, the material can actually boil away and disappear as though by magic.
In their installations the duo often play with the viewer’s perceptions, contrasting the scale of the human body with the vast realms of space. The infinity of space is reflected in what is smaller and fathomable. Many of BarroLevén’s works are, in some strange way, both surface and depth at the same time. As, for example, with Vattenhål,[Waterhole], a bowl-shaped glass sculpture which, at the same time, seems to be the container of the source – the well – and the water itself. It is as though time has chiselled out the object, giving it an archetypal expression; the drip has undermined the stone. Beneath the surface the foamglass changes colours like corals – a piece of nature that has been cast in stone and preserved for the future.
Throughout the centuries many artists have seen art as a spiritual praxis, both within and beyond the established borders. And yet, in the secular world Sweden, it has been almost impossible to speak of the “spiritual” dimension of art (whatever that may be?) without being dismissed as having lost one’s faculties or suchlike. Every artist with a sense of self-preservation has avoided mentioning the term spiritual as far as this is possible. But something seems to have changed and, today, the climate for discussion is much freer. Much of this is due to artists like Hilma af Klint and Ivan Aguéli, forerunners who prepared the ground for a more open approach. BarroLevén’s art has a spiritual dimension that is firmly rooted in the craft. It is as though their work claims: Ecce terra – Behold the earth. The mystery can be found in the visible.
Our lives on this earth are not more than an instant in a cosmic process of creation of dizzying sums of time. Humans are temporary guests in a world that has proceeded us and that will continue after our time on earth. Presumably people throughout the ages have seen themselves as living in the “last of days”. That the world will continue after our own death, as though nothing has happened, is far too grand a violation of the human ego.
With our human destructive influence on the climate and ecosystem, this predicament now appears in sharper contours. How, as an individual artist, can one use the knowledge that our entire human environment is threatened? Regardless of whether dealing with this takes place on a conscious level or not, the work of many artists is coloured by this at the moment. As a streak of sadness, even of despair.
In BarroLevén’s most recent work sadness is also present – a silvery blackness reminding us of the world’s beauty and its vulnerability. But the charred stems of our world that can be seen in the exhibition Tillfällig gäst testify not only to fire and birth, but also to an afterwards; the way in which fire makes way for rebirth for plants and animals. In this way the sculpture also deals with rebirth, of the law of the seed corn that has to be buried in the earth and die in order for the growth to take place and to give a harvest. In BarroLevén’s world we are faced with the darkness of sadness, but we are simultaneously reminded of the fact that the darkness is one of life’s necessary preconditions – its true home.
The Swedish philosopher and mystic Emilia Fogelklou saw artistic activity as a sort of mining endeavour in which the artist, “out of her inner awareness, lets the hidden, unborn, non-understood be breached into the day”. She felt that she saw two different artistic strategies: to be a wakener or a rester. A wakener is a species of activist who illustrates the need for changes to society. A rester, on the other hand, takes “social responsibility” by making art for contemplation that has room for resting. BarroLevén probably belongs to the latter category, but I should personally like to believe that the rester – particularly now that we are constantly online – also has the ability to awaken.
