THE SCULPTURE

In LAYER, Eva Hild unites organic movement and technical precision in an abstract form of thin walls and cavities. The sculpture is voluminous, complex and open, both reflecting and challenging its surroundings between Smia community house and the adjacent roundabout. The chalk-white form condenses a series of dualities: it is at once structured and irregular, growing and still, inside and outside. 

‘I love that the sculptures have spaces you can walk around and into, where the forms embrace people and take in the landscape. Here, a special energy arises, a kind of joy in how the sculpture seems to bubble. It has a sense of movement and a clear lift’, says Hild. 

The sculpture rises with a lightness and rhythm, like a choreographic balancing act, changing as you move around it. Toward Smia, LAYER appears as a layered structure, with slats and transparency. Toward the main road and the roundabout, it opens into large cavities and rounded vaults that bubble and press beneath the surface. 

LAYER is made of aluminium but originates in clay, the foundational material in Hild’s practice. Through clay she has explored life experiences in an abstract formal language with slow, craft-based precision. From there, Hild moved into larger sculptures where the forms take on a more architectural and enveloping scale. Each work has its own rhythm and technical challenges, and the forms arise from a search for a narrative that can sustain the whole practice. 

For Hild, her works emerge through the word pressure – that which presses from within or without, and materialises in form and surface. The sculptures become a meeting point between inner and outer worlds – between emotions, experiences, society and expectations. Hild herself calls them ‘abstract self-portraits’. 

EVA HILD (b. 1966) 

Eva Hild is a Swedish artist educated at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. She is known for her monochrome sculptures in an abstract, organic visual language characterised by volumes and space. Starting out in ceramics, Hild later moved into materials that enabled larger productions, such as stainless steel and aluminium. 

Hild draws inspiration from emotional structures such as influence, pressure and relationships, and often refers to her sculptures as ‘bodies’. She grew up in a family of doctors and practised physiotherapy briefly before becoming an artist. This background has given her a particular awareness of the body – of balance, equilibrium and the connections between the inner and the outer world. 

‘There is a contact between me, my body, and the material. I translate my own psychological and emotional experiences into a sculptural, abstract formal language.’