Hemliga Famnar – An echo of something we have yet to understand

In these undiscovered rooms lie secrets, dreamlike capsules and quiet corners that welcome you into a gentler world, curious yet calm. Shapes move slowly, like hidden cocoons waiting for light. They whisper of birth, of silent motion, of warmth that embraces and invites.
A place that does not wish to be captured, only experienced.
They speak a language greater than our own, filled with secret embraces and echoes of something ancient.
Elsa Ekman has carried creation with her for as long as she can remember. Even in childhood she viewed the world through a sense of wonder, like Thumbelina on an expedition among stones, leaves and hidden corners. A piece of bark became a bowl, a sandcastle an entire world. That same gaze, curious and imaginative, continues to shape her artistic practice today.

Her works move through a landscape between existence, life forms and mysticism. Fossils in old stone floors, Gaudí’s architecture and the flowing lines of Art Nouveau are sources of fascination, forms that speak, repeat but never become rigid or predictable. Ekman seeks the uncertain, that which has not yet taken its final form. She works on several pieces simultaneously, building layer upon layer with watercolor, collagraphy, collage, color pencil and oil pastel. She cuts, transforms and lets something new grow from what already exists. The same sense of surrender and surprise is found in her stoneware sculptures, a willingness to let go and be moved by what emerges.

Ekman moves in constant emotional dialogue with her works. They are born from her with a force that cannot be restrained. Like fragments of paintings they come together into a whole, a wave-like motion revealed only when you take a step back. These are works that seem to pulse, almost resonate, through their fields of color and organic forms. Soft, refined, yet open and alive.

Ekman’s debut exhibition invites the viewer into a space where one can lose direction and find calm, just as the artist herself does in dialogue with her materials. Here unfolds a universe of forms that both enchant and ground, moving within the borderland between nature, body and imagination.

Elsa Ekman (b. 1986) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Her education includes studies in art at Santa Monica College (2011) and Artistlab Academy (2022–2024) under the mentorship of Peter Sköld. Hemliga Famnar marks her public debut as an artist in 2025. She explores a broad range of materials and techniques, creating in her studio at the family home in Hemfosa just outside Stockholm, as well as at the ceramics studio Ateljé 7 in Stockholm.