Mirror, U-turn Stories, Flag mirror designed by Inger Andersson, 2016

A mirror made from laminated mirror glass in the form of a flag.

Purchased with the support of the Friends of the V&A

Inger Andersson (b.1963) is a Swedish artist and ceramicist based outside of Stockholm in the studios associated with the porcelain factory Gustavsberg. She graduated from the Konstfack (University College of Arts, Crafts and Design) in Stockholm in 1992 and has dedicated her career to large-scale public commissions for schools, libraries and hospitals. Her most recent work leans towards the architectural and she is currently working on a façade of one of the buildings of the Stockholm hospital Södersjukhuset. Her work is represented in the collections of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and Röhsska in Gothenburg.

Since 2007 Andersson has executed some of her work with the help of industrial pane glass manufacturers and through this connection she has become increasingly familiar with the technique of cutting glass with waterjets. It is this technique that she has adapted from the industrial to the domestic with her U-turn series of mirrors – a series of decorative wall-mounted pieces executed in laminated, water-cut glass.

The mirrors were completed by Andersson in the autumn of 2016 and they were first shown with Widell Projects at Collect 2017, at the Saatchi Gallery in London in February 2017.

Inger Andersson (b.1963) is a Swedish artist and ceramicist based outside of Stockholm in the studios associated with the porcelain factory Gustavsberg. The U-turn series of mirrors is made up of laminated mirror glass cut into circles, semi-circles, dots and triangles, glued together to form shapes such as fans, flags and rhomboids. The series is called U-turn as it represents a change in direction for Andersson, going from making large-scale public installations to these smaller domestic objects that she produced herself, created from the pre-cut glass parts from a pane glass manufacturer. Andersson pushed the technique of laminating glass by mixing and applying different coloured laminates to the mirror glass, until eventually reaching the two hues in this series – a yellowish green and blueish white.

W.4-2018