Here is a person who knows how to
make an entrance look so collected, and so very much entranced. And all of a
sudden she is just there: impeccably cool, humanly warm, dressed in black (as
she ever is) with the grey hair pulled back into a perfect ponytail. She announces
her name as she stretches out her hand very quickly. Ingegerd Råman is
seventy-three years old or young and she is pure class.
“All design that I have made is
also really about how to show what I feel for the material itself. I as a
designer I am not an artist because the designer needs the material, and most
often the assignment itself. I love the framework, and when things are settled,
that is what triggers me,” she says. “Everything in here is very close to me. I
make things that I would like to have around me, something that feels as if it
has always been there and always looked like that, something that is not
constantly yelling that it is Ingegerd Råman who is the designer.”
We are where Ingegerd Råman is – the eponymously titled exhibition in
Nationalmuseum’s interim design space at Kulturhuset in Stockholm (during the
old institution’s extensive refurbishing of its Blasieholmen premises). And there
is no yelling in here. This writer purchased as many of her Bellman drinking glasses as he could
afford in the 1980s, and these “imperfect” tumblers (still in production), with
their different marks of the hand-blown process, are just as precise and absolutely
beautiful today. They are, somehow, perfect. Råman has the skills to bring her matters
to a certain timeless perfection that is warm and eloquent and disciplined, without
the noise and the killing narcissism we have everywhere else.
The only murmur in the commodious
room comes from a number of little white boxes with their looping videos of the
designer talking about her pieces. It is even greater to follow the ponytail
around from table to table (they are twenty-four in all) as Råman reveals how
she always have to do a lot of work to remove much of the self-doubt and the
apprehension involved when she takes on a new project. “When I work I think
ahead, but when you go back like this you encounter all those problems and the
stories in the process. At first I am excited when I get an assignment, and
that someone has thought of me for this, but next comes the feeling that this
will never work – it can be about a small glass or a major thing – and I cannot
get rid of it, and that takes so much of my energy.” Then an altered tone: “In
spite of everything, all this has been achieved. It is amazing.”
Susanne Eriksson, Project Manager
at Nationalmuseum, wouldn’t call the exhibition a retrospective though, but “a
deep dive into a designer life in progress, where there are new assignments all
the time”. Ola Rune from Claesson Koivisto Rune, the company that designed the
distinct tables, jests: “We serve Ingegerd here, on the tables, in a very
playful way. The objects behave a bit differently but it works just fine on the
twenty-four different materials.”
Ingegerd Råman goes directly to the
nearest table with a bright, reddish colour and with the plainest articles in the
show, some terracotta flowerpots. The simplicity of the flowerpot was the very
thing that made her become a potter (she seems to prefer “potter” to
“ceramist”) after her studies at the University College of Arts, Crafts and
Design in Stockholm in the late 1960s. “It is so nice that the orange table is
the first thing you meet. It’s like a heartbeat, it is a warmth that I also
hope is present in my design. Although it is extremely simple and strict, I put
my heart into everything I do. There has to be a force and a sense of a sender,
someone who has been thinking. I hope that the visitors feel the same, that you are
greeted by this kindness.”
The table (any dinner table) also
serves as a great human symbol for Råman. “And the longer I live, the more I also
experience how similar all people are,” she emphasises. “And especially when it
comes to using things on the table for what we eat and drink. I also want to
mention that you do not need so much to meet: a spoon, a bowl, a piece of bread
on a plate and something good to eat and drink. A meal is one of the most
important meeting places I know.” She even designed a series of cutlery (Indra) to counteract the growing size of
dinner plates.
The carafe topped by a
sophisticated drinking glass is a Råman hallmark. She calls the table that is unusually
crammed with her carafes – from 1968 to the newest one for Nationalmuseum – a
“mess”. It is obvious how instrumental this object has been in her designer
world. “I think it is important when you utilise an idea that every new object
that you do are given its own dignity, its character, and its own language and
life. You can regard them as relatives who connect to each other, closer and
further away.”
When she was asked to design a wine
glass for the members of the Parliament she insisted it couldn’t be done
without a water glass. “Water has always been very central to me. It is
important that water is served during a meal. I was and studied in Italy for a
year, and there was always a water carafe on the table. And it was something
that did not exist here in Sweden during the early 1960s. I think that you have
to serve water to wine.” Quite typically for Råman, she ended up designing the
tableware for the Parliament’s restaurant as well.
She has also modernised the Arms of
Sweden for the Speaker’s chair in the Parliament (a collaboration) by going back
to the traditional emblem, designed a superb champagne coupe with the engraved
Three Crowns for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and a particularly standard
giveaway vase to match the tastes of the blue-blooded populace in the Royal
Castle.
Two exceptional beauties are La pomme (2016), a glass made for a
Swedish brand that produces cidre de
glace, which is a type of cider made from frozen apples. The glass is
presented here in a ring like a dance around the maypole, the slender bottle
with apple flowers printed on its naked cork. Another glass to love is Pärlan (the pearl) from 2009, a conical
dram glass with a wide foot (here on a bronze tabletop).
Every object in the show is right
there on the tables, unprotected, regardless of how precious or mass-produced
they are (she produced a series of bamboo objects for the multinational Swedish
four-letter furniture company earlier this year). Råman points at a pitcher
with a swelling bottom. “I think that we all carry with us memories of shapes
that make certain things appeal to us. It is often much later that I can recognise
the connection to what I have done,” she explains. “This is a memory of a shape
that became a pitcher that I was extremely fond of when it was finished, and
did not understand what it was until a year later – a portrayal of what I
thought was so beautiful when I was a young girl and was visiting my
grandparents: This is the lower part of my grandfather’s shaving brush.”
Her first job after finishing her
design studies in Stockholm was a few deadening years at the Johansfors’
glassworks in southern Sweden, where she was charged to paint folkloristic
finery on their glassware. She worked as a potter for a ten-year period before
she made Bellman for Skruf’s
glassworks in the early 80s and stayed there until 1998.
Råman tells that, “The reason why I
switched glassworks, from the small Skruf to the large Orrefors, was to give me
the opportunity to get close to the two techniques that I had always dreamed of
working with. I had only just begun with the cut glass before Orrefors closed
[in 2013], but I went into the centrifuged glass quite early and then did
things like Pond. I also took the
time to sit down and watch how everything was made and what the possibilities
were. But of course I did something that was against all odds, to centrifuge
something that was oval. And it was said to me from the beginning that this was
impossible, but here are the results.”
The inexpensive Pond (2002) is a centrifuged bowl (and
dishes in four sizes and colours) based on a technique that was invented by
Sven Palmqvist who created his Fuga
(fugue) bowl in 1954 by pouring molten glass into a swiftly rotating mould.
Palmqvist’s different bowls from the time (including the colourful Colora) are much more appealing however.
(And what is there to say about cut glass more than it is a boring expression
of tedious skills.)
“All we craftspeople have something
in common: we have a language that is unresolved,” says Ingegerd Råman who
became a lifetime professor in 1995, appointed by the Government. She has
designed all kinds of things, from a pink ribbon with her granddaughter’s name
on it, Saga – who is also one of the nineteen voices in the pamphlet-like
catalogue, which is free for every visitor but just over the top with useless
praise – to a handful of architectural assignments together with Gerd Wingårdh,
like the House of Sweden, the country’s Georgetown embassy in Washington, DC.
Benny
Andersson asked her to design a gift for the ensemble of the Kristina from Duvemåla musical, based on
Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants suite
from the 1950s, so Råman surprised the Abba member with a glass apple. (The
homesick Kristina’s final words in the novel are: “It’s an astrakhan. Our apples are ripe. I’m
home.”)
“Kristina
had brought seeds from astrakhan apples from Sweden to America, and these seeds
she had planted. And when she lies there on her deathbed, Karl Oskar brings her
the very first astrakhan apple,” Råman explains. “However, when I got this
assignment I went to a gardener and we came to talk about the astrakhan apple
and that little seed. And then he told me, that when you plant a seed from an
astrakhan apple it will never be an astrakhan tree because the seed is
manipulated from different varieties. And then I asked, ‘Are you sure, can it never?
There must be a chance.’ ‘Yes, it is like a star in the universe,’ he
answered.”
Here
is an elegant pause.
“So
then there is a chance. It was indeed a miracle that happened.”
Ingegerd Råman at Nationalmuseum Design,
Kulturhuset in Stockholm through August 14, 2016.