Karin Forslund is a Swedish glassmaker and artist, currently based in Denmark. She received formal training as a glassmaker in Orrefors, Sweden, and received a B.A. from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, School of Design in Bornholm, Denmark. Karen has worked on multiple art glass production jobs in both Sweden and Denmark, including Åfors Glass Factory. She has also worked for numerous internationally acclaimed artists. She has exhibited at various venues in Denmark and Sweden including Nordiska Kristall and the Bornholm Art Museum; and, was recently nominated for the 2013 Stanislav Libensky Award. With an aesthetic background in the indigenous tradition of Scandinavian glass, her artistic approach uses the principal of the dogme to probe the creative relationship between maker and material, taking interest in the subjectivity of materiality and execution of craft. During her residency, Karen will pursue a special project titled, “Frameworks,” exploring glass in context of cultural heritage and history.
“The process of idea transforming to material. I believe applied art today as being in motion in a grey zone between fine art, design and craft, without clearly defined rhetorical affiliations. Where is the definition between working with a craft and a material? A framework embodies components creating a whole. A framework is thus constructed. By this assumption it is relative and thereby it can be renegotiated and thus renewed/altered. Where is the creative value in what we create and the fact that we create? In this project I will work with sculptural form in an attempt to search the borders where maker meets material and thereby searching the essence of the creative process.”