Star Roads (Igelsta 2018)

A public commission for the municipality of Södertälje, designed for Igelsta primary school. A project in multiple parts – mapping school roads and starry skies by embroidery, felt textile and light design, and playing with coloured shadows. In the music room, I painted an acoustic panel in accord with the classical Chinese pentatonic scale. Furthermore, I invited three colleagues to bring their designs into the setting; feltmaker Anna Gran, and visual artists Karin Frankenstein and Tomas Auran.

(1) Mapping the School Roads
Schoolkids in two classes helped me out by drawing maps showing their way to school. These 40+ individual maps were fused into a composite whole, then again divided into 21 triangular pieces. The original drawings were rendered into embroidery upon felt, forming six clusters mounted along the walls.

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Cluster one (above): the school building with all tracks converging, an apple tree and a compass, sun, moon and stars.

Cluster two (above, below): residential area with houses, cars and trees, two ponds, a forest and a lake. And a road with a beginning, but no end…

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Clusters three and four (above, below): residential houses of various kinds, stones, traffic lights, construction cranes, a dog, a playground, railroad and bus stops, a church, a preschool and two reindeers.

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Cluster five (above, below): da home, a second-hand shop, the treehouse and two rabbits, cars, pedestrian walks, random homes, da lake, an angler and a duck wearing a top hat, Thai restaurant, gas station and commuter train.

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Cluster six (above): a shop and a pizzeria, a cheerful roadsign doing the high five, a puddle to jump in, a house with dustbins and letterbox, a coffee kiosk, some thoughts on approaching school, and a teacher arriving by bicycle.

(2) Coloured Lights, Curious Shadows

This part of the commission was designed for a corridor where one wall offers a long, curved projection surface; it was painted in matte white, and ten gobo projectors supplied with colour filters were mounted into the opposite wall. The passer-by brings about shifting layers of light shades, and is thereby invited to play along.

(3) Starry Sky Alcove – textile design by Anna Gran, fibre optics

An alcove in the curved wall was furnished with a bench in two levels, and covered all over with nuno felt; a compound , made from thin silk felted together with sheep wool. This blueish black textile is designed and produced by feltmaker Anna Gran at Högklint activity centre. Fibre optic cables, mounted in the walls and ceiling of the dark alcove, glow like star constellations: Orion, Auriga, Taurus, Gemini, Cassiopeia, Eridanus…

(4) Marble Wool designs for classrooms by Karin Frankenstein and Tomas Auran
To enhance the acoustic environment, three wall sculptures were created by Karin Frankenstein and Tomas Auran. The design is site-specific, and their material – marble wool – is developed and produced by the artists.

(5) Musical Colour Scales
Acoustic diffusor in classroom, interpreting musical scales into colour tones in paint, gold and silver.

Information signboard in corridor, size equalling round windows and coloured light spots;
design HHW.

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