ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | CONTEMPORARY GLASS

Ulrica Hydman-Vallien

Although her preferred medium may be glass, Ulrica Hydman-Vallien is a painter. Looking at her glass, this can be as easily discerned as in any of her acrylic on canvas works or in any of her inkwashes. Where many glass artist work thoroughly with its transparent and optical properties, Hydman-Vallien's work lives very much on the surface with the transparent glass beneath it revealing an secret inner dimension.

Her kabale technique, of her own invention, takes this surface/under-surface tension that exists in her works and turns it on its head. Here the painting has become encased in layers of thick glass essentially asking the viewer to look through a window (or perhaps, a looking glass) at her work.

Very much a storyteller, Hydman-Vallien has created a very elaborate mythology. In the early '60s, she traveled to Mesoamerica, and found inspiration for her work in pre-Columbian sculpture as well as the vibrantly colored indigenous culture. Fairy tales, asiatic culture, pop art, naïve art from her native Sweden these and more have found a voice in Ulrica. Yet she has developed a very personal symbology. Snakes and snake-tongue women, snake eggs (she found a nest of them as a child, to the horror of her mother), cats (she and Bertil Vallien have a mummified cat that they found under the floorboards of their house), family, strong willed nude women, babyish men, tulips, and birdwomen and men are culled from her life's experiences and turned into a personal mythology that plays out in her glass and in her paintings.