‘Konstvandring i Dalsland’ is an annual ‘art walk’ held on Ascension Day, during which artists and craftspeople open their studios and workshops across Dalsland to visitors. Over four days, you can drive through the early summer landscape, stop, step inside, chat, look around – and discover a wide variety of art forms, from painting and sculpture to ceramics.
Andreas, along with Beate and Lars – who are currently visiting the Dalsland studio – get into the car on a sunny morning and follow the small, yellow Konstvandring map, which uses numbers to mark the studios throughout the area. The doors are open between 11 am and 5 pm, and it feels as though the whole of Dalsland has turned into one huge, decentralised exhibition space for the weekend.
The first stop is Lennart Calås, a sculptor and designer whose wooden sculptures – often animals, always meticulously crafted – combine the long tradition of Nordic woodcraft with a highly distinctive, humorous visual language. We find it fascinating how clearly craftsmanship, knowledge of materials and art converge here, and how naturally Lennart has established himself in the regional scene as Dalsland’s ‘voice of wood’. They invite us in for coffee and Fikabröd and tell us stories from their long lives. They are both well over 80.
With Viktoria Salma, we enter a completely different world: photographs, objects and 3D Polaroids that interweave spirituality, nature and inner visual spaces. Her works are closer to conceptual photography and installation art, introducing a meditative, reflective dimension to an exhibition landscape otherwise strongly characterised by craftsmanship.
We move on to Lars-Göran Abrahamsson, whose studio is rooted in the landscape and whose painting translates motifs from the region and everyday life into a highly personal visual language. Here it becomes clear just how important the “Konstvandring” is as a platform for bringing such consistent, often rather quiet artists to the fore – for neighbours as well as for visitors from further afield.
At Tamar Henriksson Schäfte’s studio, we encounter a practice that oscillates between art and craft and is representative of many of the studios where experiments with materials, references to everyday life and personal narratives intertwine. In direct encounters – brief conversations, a glance at the workbench, sketches on the wall – it becomes apparent just how much this art is geared towards intimacy and exchange.
Finally, we come to Tina Reuterberg, a ceramicist whose vessels and sculptural ceramic forms are firmly rooted in contemporary studio ceramics. Her presence in national ceramic circles highlights just how closely the regional “Konstvandring” is linked to the wider ceramic art scene – it feels like a crossroads between village streets, workshops and internationally informed practice.
At the end of the day, we return to Dalslands Studio with maps, catalogues and a few carefully packed works – and with the feeling that “Konstvandring i Dalsland” is not just an exhibition spread across many locations, but brings to life a vibrant network of people, materials and stories.
On the return journey, Andreas accompanied Beate and Lars as far as Uddevalla – where they stopped off at the Bohuslän Museum to bid farewell and let the art surprise them one last time.
‘21 Degrees’, the final exhibition of the Bachelor’s and Master’s students from HDK-Valand Campus Steneby/Dals Langed in metal design and furniture-oriented wood design, feels like a condensed echo of the past few days: material, body, space – but this time in the concentrated form of 21 final projects. Moving between metal objects, furniture prototypes and installation-based works, we feel as though we are in a shared laboratory where questions of coexistence, sustainability and everyday scenarios are translated into material form.
For us, who were just standing in workshops surrounded by sawdust, sketches and long conversations, these projects have a certain poignancy: you can sense just how much time, doubt and determination have gone into each piece. “21 Degrees” marks a moment of transition – a farewell to student life and the first step towards independent artistic and creative practices that lead out into the world from Steneby and Dalsland.