This May, I spent the day in a beautiful ravine in southern Sweden with Friedel Weiser—a sculptor, trumpeter, and movement artist. His presence and style had stayed with me since we first met, and inspired me to create a silver hairpin—slightly organic in form, with a band of Feldspar stone, a quiet nod to his sculptural work. As he built one of his sculptures that day, we talked about life, art, and nature.
Tell me a bit about your background and where you grew up. Your parents being artists, how has that and where you grew up informed your work?
I grew up on Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea, off the east coast of Sweden. Both my parents are, as you said, working in an artistic and somatic field and run a cultural space in Anga on Gotland. “Vibrationsverket” as it is called has brought many inspiring artists to our home from all over the world. It wouldn’t have been a given for me to become an artist and work the way I do if it weren’t for my parents and the window to the world that they provided. Gotland still has a great amount of unexploited natural areas and a great diversity of different biomes. It’s a very rich place, the landscape precious, strong, and special in so many ways. I bring with me from there a sense of having been close to something very real.
Your sculptures; tell us a bit about them and how you came to create these maple veneer pieces.
They partly stem from my trumpet playing actually. When I play the trumpet, I interact with the space in the room. I wanted to sculpt in and with the air, creating forms that can be like sounds but also something else. The material I used for this sculpture is leftover material I came across it during an exchange semester in Vienna. The technician in the wood workshop gestured towards this big heap of veneer and said; “It’s leftover material. You can take it. Out of that you could weave a mountain!”. The strips are from maple veneer. They are too thin to support their own weight when woven together loosely so I work with them suspended, entering into the “trumpet realm”. This way of weaving with uniform strips is reminiscent of bamboo weaving, and there is a long tradition for it in bamboo growing regions around the world.
The space your sculptures take shape in, we spoke about this briefly, and I really loved how you approached finding a good space. If I remember correctly, you said that the space is in a way a part of making the sculpture. Would you tell me a bit more about this?
Maybe a way of putting it could be, the space of the sculpture is also the space of my experience as someone performing in the installation. It is also part of the experience of the perceiver, the audience. My work is not just my “work”, but my work. The work of weaving and hanging is something alive and ongoing, a suggestion to the place. It is also so that the shape of the woven net is influenced by the shape of the net of thread to which it is attached, which in turn is shaped by the locations of my attachment points. Every space, with different angles, distances, and proportions, will yield a different sculpture.

To see more of Friedel's work visit

@friedelweiser and friedelweiser.com

See the Banded Hairpin