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Nationalmuseum Mirror Installation
The National Museum in Stockholm opened again at the 12th of October 2018 after being closed for over five years due to a major renovation and restoration. Jenny Nordberg was invited to make a permanent mirror installation for the café and restaurant. The room where the mirror piece is placed used to be a portrait hall and a mirror itself could be seen as a temporary portrait. The mirror technique used originates from the 19th century. A painting in the museum collection, Portrait of a Young Lady as Flora painted by Louise Vigée-Lebrun was made during the same period. The few female painters who worked during that time were almost exclusively assigned to paint portraits, which was lower in rank. The white background color in the mirror is the same as in Floras dress.
The traditional mirroring process from the 19th century where a silver surface is developed on glass is rarely used today because of high cost and technical difficulty. Nordberg has been developing this technique and chosen to eliminate all the unnecessary moments as well as the requirement for perfection to achieve a more multi-dimensional mirror effect in an indeterminable form. The glass comes from one of two flat glass factories that remain in Sweden, both located in Malmö.
The technology was originally used for the first time in the 3 to 5 seconds – Rapid Handmade Production project. This projects is like many other of Jenny Nordberg’s projects part of a larger and ongoing work about how we produce and consume today, how we’ve done historically and how we could do it in the future. In the project 3 to 5 Seconds she examines how different properties from the handmade and mass produced can be combined. 3 to 5 seconds is about bringing together contradictions and hard to achieve qualities. The project combines the uniqueness of the handmade and the speed of the mass produced. Is it possible to make one of a kind handmade items really fast?
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