Artist Statement
The unexpected...
When life guided me on an unforeseen route I had no choice but to follow.
To design silver jewelry where the unexpected - the unforeseen get to play the main role, is an
incredibly exciting process. Not knowing how how the finished jewelry will look beforehand leaves all doors open for whatever my imagination tries to convey.
Once the process is up and running, it is as if the unfinished jewelry is telling me what it wants to become. It can talk about different types of straight or curved lines or shiny parts that wants to be inserted or highlighted
Not one piece looks like an other and they are all more or less like individuals. In a way, I could say that they actually do talk to me...
When I saw the result of one of the first pieces I ever made using my special technique I just knew that this is how I wanted to work. To me the piece symbolizes Phoenix - a bird that is said to have the ability to die, rise from the ashes and come to life again. It symbolizes rebirth and eternity and is also representative of hope. In a way, it does tell the story of my life. This is, with other words, the piece that steered me in the direction of, as far as I see it, art jewelry.
My “Phoenix” looked like nothing when I rinsed it, but after cleaning and polishing it, I saw him
and his been mine ever since. I can’t find myself to part with him, so he just has to
stay!
Who am I
My name is Pia J. Stengard. I was born in the southern part of Sweden in the year of 1964. Many have the moves been before I landed in Valdemarsvik at the brink of the Eastern sea. Valdemarsvik is located on the east coast of Sweden approximately an hour drive due east of Norrköping.
As of September 2023 my studio and boutique is located in Söderköping.
A little look into the rear mirror
My artistic career began at the age of 14 when I learned the basics in silversmithing. At the age of 17, I continued my journey towards silversmithing when I studied for a year in the USA. Back home, my focus became soft craft and I graduated from the University of Textiles in Borås in 1987. After my graduation I started an import company within the textile industry and worked with yarns and knitting design.
The years passed and somewhere I started to realize that what really meant something to me was colour and shape in all its constellations and how we as human beings interact, feel, live and what makes us tick. So together with a colleague I started a free healthcare magazine for the Swedish healthcare system and its waiting rooms.
I was responsible for and carried out, layout and design, photos, text and proofreading and thus got an outlet for my desire to create with image, colour and shape while the texts were about the importance of feeling good
My interest in us as human beings and all that I’ve learned over the years finally got published in a book - “The way back to the future” in 2015
However, the desire to work with silver never left me and in 2014 I resumed silversmithing and built my first own studio along side the finalization of my book.
Today, I mainly create art jewelry as well as the manufacturing of pendulums in solid sterling silveras divination tools. I also teach silversmithing, ceramics and different tkind of echniques in soft craft in my studio in Söderköping
Artist Statement
Pia J. Stengard (°1964, Lund, Sweden) is an artist who mainly works in sterling silver. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, J. Stengard wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions that generate positive emotions that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.
Her artworks establish a link between the organic forms of nature and that imagined by its conceiver. Her work focuses on concrete emotions that determine our existence. By exploring the concept of nature's organic forms in a nostalgic way, she tries to increase the dynamic between audience and artist by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.
Her works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. By examining the ambiguity via variations, she investigates the dynamics of organic forms, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what nature means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.
Her works never shows the complete structure. This results in the fact that the artist can easily
imagine an own interpretation without being hindered by the reality. Pia J. Stengard currently lives
and works in Valdemarsvik and Söderköping.
och Söderköping.
