My name is Elias Strömberg and I am an artist and blacksmith from in the city of Eksjö in Sweden. I do everything imaginable in forging, such as candlesticks, lamps, wind vanes etc. But my greatest artistic expression is my sculptures.
I build my art by forging different metals, mostly iron. I mainly use old scrap of which a large part of what I use right now comes from the ruins of old water mills and power plants in the area where I live.
Some of these materials is over a hundred years old and has usually been exposed to the elements for decades long after the wooden buildings that the iron has been a part of have rotted away and the iron has rusted so much that it has an almost organic appearance.
many of my sculptures have light sources of different kinds. I mostly use LED but experiment a lot with other light sources as well, such as old-fashioned light bulbs, neon lamps and vintage LEDs whose light I find more appealing and genuine than the LEDs we are flooded with in today’s wear and tear society.
Furthermore, I experiment a lot with breaking the sterile LED light into new shades and colors with the help of different color filters, lenses and glasses. My favorite light to work with at the moment comes from illuminating details of uranium glass with UV light, after which an eerie green glow appears, and the ultraviolet light often forms an aura reminiscent of radioactive Cherenkov radiation.
I also like to build sculptures of materials from old electrical installations. Cast iron fuse boxes and old meters of various kinds are examples of such materials that I enjoy working with and that inspire me. My art can be seen as a critique of the technological development we have seen in our time which has gone more towards cheap quantity instead of quality. For example, the antique installation material I use has usually been in use for at least 50 years before being scrapped and replaced with newer varieties of plastic whose lifespan is significantly lower than their predecessors that I now try to make art out of.
I consider our current low-quality technological development to be unsustainable. And our light sources are getting stronger and stronger and are being used too excessively, leading to more light pollution. A civilization of advanced junk where even the electric light becomes part of our pollution!
And I also find our current technological environment to be very ugly with its touch screens and dazzling bleak light sources.
My sculptures reflect my fantasies about a better and more sustainable technology. As if they came from a parallel universe where the technology is more robust! with machines, vehicles and other technological applications that are made to last for generations and whose light sources have a warmer and more pleasant glow.
instagram – experimental.metalworks