Pia Rakel Sverrisdóttir
Glassartist and designer, Pia Rakel Sverrisdóttir was born in Scotland 1953 by Icelandic-Finnish parents. In her younger years she moved to Iceland and stayed there and studied until she was 20 years. Then she went to Denmark for studies at the Royal Academi of Architecture and later, Glassdesign at Danish Designacademi. She has worked and lived in Denmark until recently. Now she has workshop in Iceland as well and travels and works in both countries.
During a career of some forty years she has been designing functionalglass, panels and partitions with sandblasted motives, freestanding panels out of metal and windowglass and tiles of recycled glass for bathrooms and kitchen. Her career started as an architect and graphic designer. Thus she is an eminently capable individual, not least when it comes to tackling glass commissions for architectural settings, supposedly her favourite assignments.
Pia Rakel Sverrisdottir´s glass art has two main characteristics. On the one hand is her ecolocigal attitude to her medium, She uses industrial planglass,- not only out of aesthetic choice, but conciders it her civic duty to recycle as much as possible of the discarded industrial glass littering our modern urban landscape today, Another characteristic of Pia Rakel Sverrisdóttir`s art is the sandblastingtecnic pronounced graphic look and naturebased imergy. Instead of using the colour spectrum, she employs mostly black and white contrasts or a selection of tones on the gray scale, which transmit a diffuse soft light while providing the user of her glass panels with a measure of privacy. This is where her sandblasting is at its most effective, allowing her to create a series of intertwining abstract imagenery which refers back to her beloved Icelandic landscape and myths. This landscape , she says- the light, glaciers, water and lava - is ever precent, yet ever transformet, in her work.
The artist has also executed a number of glass pieces based on Nordic mythology, applying similar methods of sandblasting as in her other works. Eight glass windows of this kind are to be found in an apartment block in Frederiksberg, Denmark. Among many,the VELUX companies, all over the world have been occupating her for 20 years for unikaprojects. Tema “LIGT GIVES LIVE” in every countries different. Abstrakt arcitektural forms with symbols in caracter and culture.
Recently, there was installed sandblasted glasspictures in the entrance of a Salmonhotel in Kjós,Iceland.”Streymi”, shows the lifecirkle from sea up waterfalls to lakes in the wild landscape of Iceland