Hanna Hansdotter

Artist and designer Hanna Hansdotter’s mold-blown glass sculptures and low-relief wall works ooze, slump, and bulge, their soft forms interrupted by the hard lines left behind by the casting process. Trained at the preeminent Swedish glass manufacturers at Kosta Boda Glass Center and the Orrefors National School of Glass, Hansdotter’s rebellious and individualistic vessels remain defiantly craft-oriented in their techniques. Over time, she has developed a practice of conceptual design overlaid with a punk sense of artistry, apparent in her sculptures’ warped and distorted silhouettes produced in the process of constraining hot glass within heavy iron frameworks. Once the metal cages are removed, the result is both high-gloss and heavily baroque, a merger of amorphous, fleshy forms and variegated surface embellishments. Today, Hansdotter works in Glasriket or “Glass Country,” the famed center of Sweden’s historic industrial glassblowing dating to 1742.

Hansdotter is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and accolades, including the ELLE Decoration Design Awards, the Lauritz Craft Prize, and the Residence Arts & Crafts Award. In 2020, she received the Åke Andrén Grant in support of her exhibition Fading Prints at the Prins Eugen Waldemarsudde Museum. Since graduating in 2017 from Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design, Hansdotter’s work has frequently been exhibited within museums, including at the Gävle Art Center, Liljevalchs, and the Glazenhuis Flemish Centre for Contemporary Glass Art. Her sculptures are in the collections of the Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, the Public Art Agency Sweden, The Glass Factory at Boda, and the National Museum in Stockholm.