​Amanda de Frumerie (b1980) is an artist and an illustrator living in Stockholm. Her practise moves between imaginary landscapes in the forms of board games, maps and detailed ceramic sculptures.  In recent years she has collaborated with the Swedish publishing company BCNVT, drawing and writing for books about music, as well as collaborations with bands such as Death and Vanilla and Sternpost. Her work often involves ideas of specific places, memory and childhood, always with miniscule details and tactile surfaces.  Inspired by fairy tales, medieval miniatures and japanese woodcuts. 

​Om tidigare utställningar:

​I den tid som pågår
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Det finns specifika hus och gatuadresser, platser med dofter och inskriptioner, där människor har passerat och levt sina liv. På just den här gatan, i just den här staden, äger viktiga saker rum, men knappast på ett sätt som hamnar i historieböckerna. Någon står i ett gathörn och berättar för någon annan om resor i främmande världsdelar. Någon räknar alla fönster och dörrar, stuprännor och takutsprång på fastigheten tvärsöver gatan, och funderar över husets symmetrier. Någon står i ett trapphus och lyssnar intensivt till allt som låter; fotstegen över golvet, bruset i vattenledningarna, sportsändningen som står på, porten som öppnas och slår igen, trafiken på avstånd.
   Amanda de Frumeries bildvärldar väcker de undanskymda ögonblicken till liv, ovissheten i dagdrömmerierna, tätheten i det alldagliga. Det finns konkreta kopplingar till Stockholmsstadsdelen Aspudden, framförallt som den såg ut på 1980-talet, och till Parisförfattaren Georges Perecs rebus- och pusselroman Livet en bruksanvisning. Men de miniatyrartade akvarellmotiven är sammanfogade på ett sätt som bildar egna universum, världar där tankarna kan röra sig fritt just därför att färgklangerna och anslagen är så lätta till karaktären. Små händelser, till synes obetydliga ting, människor försjunkna i det vardagligas skarpa och gåtfulla förlopp. Precis som hos Perec (och andra föregångare och visionärer som Raymond Roussel, Jules Verne och Carl Jonas Love Almqvist) finns det mönster och system som får de olika enskildheterna att gripa in i varandra och bilda nya betydelsevävar. Man hamnar i den tid som pågår, den som finns alldeles nära intill och som bara är halvt verklig. 

Magnus Haglund
Kulturskribent och författare
Utställningstext till I den tid som pågår


Hiding Places

 ​This text describes an encounter with the objects that form the central part of the exhibition Hiding Places. Or rather, it attempts to do so. My encounter with the objects has been fleeting (if intense), and the objects themselves resist easy description. Their recalcitrance in this regard isn't aggressive, or even perhaps deliberate, but due to their self-containment. Sitting just across the water from the exhibition space, Amanda and I write to each other to discuss this attempt, her asking me to write something, and sending some photographs of the objects. Now (having looked at the objects in much more detail, in situ) I cross the bridge back to the same place and write again. This text derives from notes made in the intervening days, cemented together and adjusted according to the things themselves. I keep using the term 'objects', as (if) they are of uncertain identity. They are like stones, or petrified masses of some kind, or like living things, or indeed like 'places' of some kind. Whilst (for a small being) most of them could be hidden behind, one of them could be hidden in – it has an interior. The others would seem to be exterior surfaces. Having seen them in close proximity, they are just as mysterious as they were in photographs - the material itself (its texture and density of physical detail) is photogenic, but they are of unreadable identity. I would add that, in very close proximity, they are also haptogenic; they would fit nicely in the hand, or in two hands clasped into a bowl. They seem unfathomable. Or like aquatic masses, from the fathoms. Or more precisely like coral or sponge, materials whose porosity they share, to an extent: they are formed of clay, which has been allowed to dry, before being painted, the paint slightly absorbing into the clay before the objects were fired. In describing the very fine, detailed marks that are first inscribed in the clay Amanda writes “I have drawn in the clay”, which can be productively misread in a number of ways; the clay itself, as if autonomous, drawing in marks and impressions, drawing in Amanda's long-standing desire to make these unnamable objects, drawing in and slightly fading the pigment applied to their surface, and drawing in the heat of the kiln to solidify themselves. Their mode of manufacture means that the objects are subject to an unpredictable birth; it is impossible to precisely plan the way they will be once they emerge from the fire. They almost take on personae, or almost seem to be petrified personae, relics of an animal mass that was once mobile and pliable. The same sensibility in mark-making is clearly visible in the ink drawings displayed around the objects; it's perhaps for this reason that I suddenly notice the absence of the word 'sculpture' in this text so far. The objects are of course sculptures, but thinking more personally in terms of Amanda's work they are perhaps more accurately defined by the way they have taken the gestures of drawing and painting into themselves; subsumed these modes of image-making into integral, fragile objects. 

David Edward Price, artist and critic
Text for the exhibition Hiding places 2017