Vanja Lindberg Swedish, b. 1981

Vanja Lindberg was born in 1981 in Stockholm, where she continues to work today. As a graduate from the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, she has, throughout her artistic development, practiced a wide variety of methods and techniques. Foremost among them have been drawing and sculpting. After she finished her studies, and alongside her artistic practices, she worked as a dressmaker and seamstress. These two paths – her artistry and sewing practice -- have recently become more intertwined. This has led to her current practice of textile art, which today is the primary form of her work, and in which she has converted the drawn line into the sewn seam.

Vanja Lindberg is interested in and inspired by Norse mysticism of nature and folklore, the relationship of man and mystery; of life as circular in a spiral movement of repetition and return, about letting oneself be affected by the changing of the season, as well as the different developments of life. Vanja questions the linear approach to living, where the line of life strives ever forward and upward, in an increasing pace of effort and consumption.

Vanja works with drawings and textile applications, often in parallel. Both in her drawing and in textile work, the lines are given a prominent role. Vanja draws with the sewing machine and sews many seams in every work, just as she in her drawing draws many lines. Vanja wants to, with her way of working, reconnect to how women historically constantly kept their hands occupied and busy with patching, mending, darning, embroidering, crocheting and knitting.

There are returning symbols in Vanja’s imagery. One of them is the mountain that is so primordial on Earth, and that has always been and can never grow back. She sees our contemporaries demolish the primary rock for our short-sighted purposes, which in her art symbolizes the linear view of life. Volcanoes are another recurring theme in Vanja’s images – a living mountain – that is guided by what’s happening inside Earth, and that man cannot control. Vanja is fascinated by what is happening underneath Earth’s surface, as with for example the bulb; it grows and withers, bides its time and grows again. Worms, that indefatigably work the soil beneath our feet, capture her interest in the way that, unbeknownst to most and without our asking for it, happens all the time. The moon is another evident motif for Vanja. It has always had a mystical lure and is, in many ways, the most apparent cyclical symbol that we have. She is inspired by old and ancient symbols such as Ouroboros, the snake that consumes its own tail, and emblem of how everything, material and spiritual, goes together in a perpetual cycle of destruction and rebirth. 

The very method and imagery that Vanja employs, become in themselves a cyclical process and relate to how she perceives and understands the eternal spiral of life.