Farstabonaderna: Lisa Englund
Opening
Thursday, 15.01 at 6 – 8 PM
Lisa Englund
Farstabonaderna
By Malin Ebbing
On a recent trip to Paris, I came across a whimsical collection inspired by the original wardrobe of Eugène Le Moult, an eccentric adventurer and butterfly hunter. One of the velvet coats, in a delicious midnight-blue hue and bespoke details, took me back to the ephemeral beauty of the late 19th century.
It’s the same potent poetry that comes to mind in Lisa Englund’s artistry, where a range of elusive qualities is captured in yarn, coloured with plants, flowers, mosses, and fungi, and transformed into stylised, fragrant, figurative colour fields.
The artist, also known as LIEN, explains that the aim is to transfer the magic of the organisms in nature to the yarn. She describes her creative process as a form of animism, in which the time-consuming task of collecting plants and dyeing the material is a significant part of her preparatory work.
Englund’s concept above reminds me of the brilliant Metropolitan Stories by Christine Coulson. In the humorous novel, the objects in the Metropolitan Museum's collection are the protagonists, and the story unfolds through their inner monologues, including the Unicorn Tapestries from the late 14th century, among the most famous textile works to have survived. Historically, tapestries were commissioned by kings, popes and noblemen; and these woven frescos embodied the grandest artistic ambitions of their patrons and the esteemed workshops that created them.
Englund’s contemporary take on this complex and beautiful craft deliberately entails some imperfections and a lot of improvisation:
“There is a risk of losing the feeling of punkiness, when one is striving to obtain too much perfection in the craftsmanship, so you can’t be too meticulous or too reverent”, she says.
Her compelling imagery is influenced mainly by folklore and Greek, Roman, and Nordic mythology. But it also draws on the iconography of tarot cards and astrology, where one can easily detect recurring symbols, such as snakes, stars, and little snails. “The stylised snails are often found in the ornament in printed texts from the Middle Ages”, Englund tells me.
To my delight, some playful, self-referential motives make one think of Marie-Louise Ekman, for instance, Droppen, in which the artist and a former love interest are portrayed in profile, with a drop of spit in between them.
Just like the stories told by the Parisian designer transported my mind to a golden age, Englund’s intriguing storytelling evokes an imaginative swirl that takes you on a walk with her in a lake among waterlilies and a shoal of fish, like in her graduation work Träskmarschen, which were also one of the highlights in her celebrated Beckers award exhibition at Färgfabriken 2025, introduces you to a polite squirrel and an ambiguous magpie in Gran, and a broken heart, symbolised through a stylised album cover. Maybe craftsmanship and ancient tales are essential elements for remaining a dreamer and finding something more profound in this digital age?
Lisa Englund (b. 1993), working under the name LIEN, is a Swedish textile artist from Västerås, currently based in Stockholm.
Englund works primarily with weaving and plant dyeing. By collecting mushrooms and plants to dye wool and linen yarns, she imbues her materials with what she describes as the magic of the forest, before weaving them into figurative textile works. Her practice explores borderlands between culture and nature, the sacred and the profane, the human and the animal, often drawing on folk beliefs and religious iconography.
LIEN holds a Master’s degree in Craft from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Her work has been exhibited at Färgfabriken, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum.