A Swedish Artist’s Gravity-Defying Stone Sculptures

A case could be made for both nature and nurture when it comes to the work of visual artist and sculptor Malou Palmqvist. The Swedish artist currently lives on an island in the Swedish archipelago and also comes from creative parents; her wabi-sabi stacks of organic shapes are a studied, but odd, interpretation of scattered pieces of waste that might wash ashore near her home with the seaweed. The textured forms — stoneware, wood carvings, and combinations of stone with plaster to create a marbled effect — are at once hefty and delicate, subtly clashing and full of whimsy. These “three-dimensional collages” play with gravity, as they almost all include a colored sphere balanced at the top of a pile, looking as if it is mid-fall. With varying bases that look like slabs of terracotta, a molten purple stone, and marbled pink and gray cylinders, the pieces are interesting at every angle.