Kristin Larsson is a crafter with glass as her main material. She started working in a glass studio as a fifteen-year-old and she later took a vocational degree from Kosta glass school and she has worked as a glassblower in different studios in Denmark, USA and Austria. Kristin has a bachelor and a master degree in fine art from the ceramics and glass program at Konstfack in Stockholm. Kristin lives in Gnesta Kommun in Sweden and works from her studio in Gustavsberg outside of Stockholm.
A reoccurring method in her practice is to combine glass with different metals like copper, pewter and bronze. Her work is usually playful and experimental, and by exploring the properties of the materials in the hunt for new expressions, the craft traditions, which she finds are hierarchic and limiting, are challenged.
In her master project Excavation Heritage she used an alter ego and her craft to comment on the growing nationalism in Swedish society and the phenomena of fake news. She looked into what role art, craft and museums have had to create a Swedish identity and how populistic power today are using a nostalgic idea of Swedishness, created by national romanticists, as propaganda. Inspired by historic people who actively tried to rewrite history according to their nationalistic agenda her alter ego made her own fossils containing Swedish symbols which she claimed are proof that Swedish culture was shaped by Swedish nature before we existed and therefore part of our essence. The idea of culture being something fluid and changeable would thus be disproved.
Kristin often uses a historic perspective to understand the contemporary world she lives in. She is interested in, and inspired by, archeological and natural historical findings that make us reflect upon our short existence on earth and the traces we leave behind, and how those traces will be understood by later generations. Her sculptures are a playing on the verge between the natural and the cultural.