Malin Norberg

“How do we use an object like this one? What’s its function? What happens if we interfere with it?” These questions often arose when the Stockholm-based artist Malin Norberg showed me her work. She develops sculptures inspired by cartoons and folklore. During her residency at Est-Nord-Est, she continued this exploration with a series of playful wooden sculptures drawing on forms found in daily life.

Malin speaks of “non-functional functional objects”: sculptures that resemble domestic items but can’t work as planned. A fork becomes difficult to hold because it is decked out with a huge snail-shaped handle. A butter knife is twisted in on itself. These objects were familiar, but slight shifts tumbled them into the realm of play and fiction. On the wall, a small shelf held a carefully crafted apple core. Farther along, spoons and long pieces of wood became the fingers of a large open palm – perhaps the hand of a cartoon character waving at us.

Just before she left for Est-Nord-Est, Malin lost her studio in Sweden. She had also wrapped up two years devoted to a major public art project that had left her exhausted. We talked about how difficult it is to find a viable way to be and stay an artist – about the physical and mental fatigue, and also about how curiosity becomes blunted under the constant pressure to produce. At Est-Nord-Est, she rediscovered joy. She sculpted, but she also drew, sewed, painted, sang, and made music.

In her studio, a computer, notebooks, templates, tools, wood samples, tubes of paint, pastels, bobbins of thread, and sculptures in progress sat side by side on tables. Things often sprang to life through unplanned encounters within this chaos. Having to live in her workplace fed this process. Her brain operates like her hands do: it needs to be busy making connections.

Looking at the completed works, I completely forgot the physical labour that they required. The surfaces were smooth. The forms seemed flexible and light. Malin injured herself while sanding them. She reflected on ways of taking better care of her body’s limitations. Learning to stop is difficult. But by diversifying media, she can diversify her movements and thus minimize injury. During the residency, the forms that she developed went beyond wood, reappearing in drawings and paintings. There were silhouettes resembling the cartoon speech bubbles that she sculpted in various sizes and shapes – sometimes rounded, sometimes bristling with points as if bursting with emotion. It was a way to extend into other media the world in which objects diverted from their function become characters in small stories.