THINGS ALMOST SEEN
Text: Isabelle Ståhl
May rain over the Värmdö Highway. Bus 474 heading toward the glass studio in Gustavsberg. Rain-soaked motorway haze, blurred greenery beyond the window, the steel-grey mirror of Riddarfjärden. Clouds sealing the world beneath a lid. The light has withdrawn from the earth.
For a period of time, another person and I spoke almost exclusively about light. We worked in a subterranean room, our backs turned toward one another. Light rarely reached that far down. We sat in silence before our screens for hours, exchanging little more than hello and goodbye.
Then, suddenly, he would begin speaking about the light in a school gymnasium in autumn when he was a child. About the light over an ice rink.
“Was it a cold light?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Yellow. Slightly warm.”
I could see his light before me: the gymnasium, the rink, the faint yellow glow cast across the ice. And he seemed able to see mine: the white light of a delivery room. Not merely its image, but the feeling carried within that light itself.
For a moment, we shared a world.
I asked him about the light in another country where he had spent many years, but then he no longer wished to speak.
Afterwards, I tried to paint his light. I discarded every canvas.
A few months later, I am on the bus to Gustavsberg. The industrial district. The freight elevator. Corridors with worn floors, enamel signs from another era, furnaces that seem untouched since the 1930s. The scent of scorched clay and metal lingers in the walls. Rasmus Nossbring slides the glass into the furnace.
The furnace burn at eleven hundred degrees Celsius, yet the glass still appears cold as it melts.
That is perhaps the strangest aspect of the entire process. You peer into something that ought to resemble the sun, yet instead it recalls ice, laboratory glass, crystal. I can scarcely bring myself to look inside the furnace.
Rasmus Nossbring is no longer afraid of fire.
“It’s like cooking,” he says. “You learn what to be careful of.”
He began working in the glass industry straight after lower secondary school. The factory floor came before art school. Something of that apprenticeship remains embedded in his practice: the rhythm, the repetition, the understanding of glass as a material that is never truly made alone.
Historically, glassworks, laboratories, and alchemical workshops stood close to one another. The same furnaces. The same minerals. The same attempts to transform matter through heat and motion.
What strikes me first may not even be the objects themselves, but the process surrounding them. Glass demands several people at once. One tends the heat, another turns the blowpipe, another opens the furnace, another waits for the precise temperature before the next movement can occur. If the temperature drops, the sculpture cracks. If someone works too slowly, the whole structure collapses.
There is something unusual in this collective labour organized around heat and time. So many art forms are built upon solitude. Here, several bodies stand around the same source of heat, trying to keep something alive for a few seconds longer.
Nossbring describes his exhibitions as scenes, or situations, that come into being only once before the objects are separated again. The works “argue” with one another. One object, one detail, draws the gaze onward to the next. A distortion in the glass alters the image as you move through the room.
In my doctoral research, I studied physicians in 1920s Berlin who used hashish and mescaline in order to understand psychosis from within. They sat together in the same room, writing while the intoxication unfolded. Several people attempting to open the same associative current at once.
After one experiment, the physician Ernst Joël walks home through Berlin at dawn. He describes the first light over Hansa-Ufer, how the river continues through Europe under other names, how the same water further south becomes the Arno.
In the notes from these experiments, light returns again and again: traffic signals shining through rain, the light encountered when emerging from a tunnel, the sensation of leaving a dark cinema in the middle of the day.
It is difficult not to think of Surrealist collages and collective experiments when looking at Nossbring’s objects. Forms and images are pushed into one another without ever entirely fusing. An eye appears within a transparent body. An animal slips into a face. One motif continues into the next object. The connections are not logical, yet they feel exact.
The glass itself also carries something alchemical. The same fundamental dream that animated laboratories and glassworks alike: to alter matter through heat until something new comes into being.
The components lie scattered across the worktables. They look like frozen light. Pale green capsules. Smoke-blue and violet weights. Transparent forms containing small images, suspended and displaced within. Light refracts unevenly through the glass so that the motifs retreat the moment one tries to fix them in place.
In this new exhibition, he works far more transparently than ever before. For a long time, he avoided what is most conventionally “glass-like”: the delicate, the translucent, the immaculate. Now he moves toward precisely that.
He returns several times to a particular light from northern Sweden, where his partner comes from. Not the light of John Bauer. Not the light of fairy tales. Rather the final light of sunset before darkness fully takes hold. A light that is almost disappearing even as one sees it.
“There is something in that atmosphere,” he says, “that allows thought to travel along different paths.”
He says that children often understand the works more quickly than adults. They simply say what they see. A bird. An animal. A face. Something resembling something else. Associations move freely, without needing explanation.
“I am constantly longing to escape language,” he says. “Toward the image.”
And yet he continually speaks of trying to transfer something into the objects.
“You load things into them.”
What things?
“Several feelings at once.”
He also says that objects can die when they are explained too clearly. That texts sometimes immobilize what ought to remain in motion.
It is visible in the works themselves. They feel both solid and fugitive: memory-images that have just managed to solidify before vanishing—something of the light, the atmosphere, the moment, briefly held within matter.
As I leave through the rain, I see the blue-green light above the Värmdö Highway once more. The wet darkness stretched across the road. The light suspended above the traffic.
As though the world were still trying to reveal itself.
Isabelle Ståhl is the author of Just nu är jag här (The Anxiety of Time, 2017) and Eden (2023), a critic for Dagens Nyheter, and holds a PhD in the History of Ideas. She completed her doctorate with the dissertation The Laboratory of the Psyche: Accounts of Drug Experiments in the Weimar Republic (Psykets laboratorium: skildringar av drogexperiment i Weimarrepubliken, Ellerströms, 2023).
