DesignerSwedish
Ann Wåhlström
3 active items
Ann Wåhlström was born in Stockholm in 1957 and trained across two continents before finding her medium in glass. Her educational path took her from Capellagården on Öland - the craft school founded by Carl Malmsten that instilled an ethic of material honesty - to the Glass School in Orrefors, and then to the United States. At the Pilchuck Glass School outside Seattle she encountered the studio glass movement in its most experimental phase, and she later completed formal design studies at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence and at Konstfack in Stockholm. That combination of Nordic craft tradition and American studio practice gave her an unusually wide technical and conceptual vocabulary.
In 1985 she held her first solo exhibition, at Gallery Nilsson/New Glass in New York, and it was there that Kosta Boda came to her attention. She joined the glassworks in 1986, beginning a collaboration that would last nearly twenty years. At Kosta Boda she worked in the space between industrial production and artist-designed limited editions, contributing both to the main collection and to pieces made directly at the furnace. Her approach was to develop forms on the blowpipe rather than on paper first - a working method that kept her designs physically grounded in the constraints and possibilities of molten glass.
Among the series she developed during her Kosta Boda years, the "Soap Bubble" collection became one of her most recognisable: thinly blown vessels with a luminous, almost ephemeral quality, available in a range of pure colours. The "Kalebass" vases, with their gourd-like silhouettes and saturated tones, have also remained consistently collectible. Other recurring forms in the auction market include the "Nest" vases, the "Cypress" candlesticks in clear glass, and a range of decanters and stemware that brought her graphic sensibility into everyday tableware. The 1999 exhibition "Cyclone" at the Småland Museum gave a focused survey of her artistic production. In 2009, long after leaving Kosta Boda, she designed the "Iris" vase series for Svenskt Tenn, extending her work into a new institutional context.
Her work has entered the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Ebeltoft Glasmuseum in Denmark, and the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts. Since 2005 she has worked as an independent designer and artist, maintaining studios in both Stockholm and, periodically, in Seattle and Tacoma.
On the Nordic auction market, Wåhlström's Kosta Boda work circulates regularly at regional Swedish houses. Her 38 auction records in the Auctionist index span houses including Ekenbergs, Kalmar Auktionsverk, Metropol, and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare - all well-placed to handle Smaland-origin glass. The highest result is 3,000 SEK for a large "Jättevas" prototype vase; a "Soap Bubble" prototype in purple achieved 1,500 SEK; a numbered "Kalebass" vase reached 1,350 SEK; and a pair of "Iris" vases for Svenskt Tenn sold at 850 EUR. Prototype and sample pieces consistently outperform standard production, reflecting the collector premium on unique or pre-production work.