Mia E Göransson at Officine Saffi

“My work, a kind of depiction of nature, has increasingly come to be characterised by anxiety and threat,” says Mia E Göransson, who recently had her first solo show of ceramics in Italy. The Swedish artist and designer has been exhibiting regularly around the world since 2000, after graduating from Konstfack, the University of Art, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, in 1994.

The exhibition was an insight into the Göransson’s fascinating perspective on the ecosystems of everything from rocks and metaphysical architecture to cacti and small planets. Simply: New Nature, in which shapes sourced from the natural environment are decontextualised and remixed to reveal the geometric lines, vortices and trajectories that inhabit the organic world. All made in ceramics, tension is created between the delicate transience and earthy eternalness of the material.

“Through the years, my courage to let myself be led by gut instinct and intuition has increased, which has made my design more abstract,” she also told The Fifty Fifty Projects. Not unlike Kandinsky, Göransson uses colour, geometry and irregularity to achieve abstraction. ”The results are not always beautiful, often quite ambiguous, sometimes a bit dirty, something both the rub and seductive,” she goes on.

With a surreal and playful spirit, the abstracted forms and colours give rise to unusual objects. On display at Officine Saffi, a centre for contemporary ceramics in Milan, the objects were arranged in complex installations that could just as soon be interpreted as children’s games, or “small models of enigmatic cities of the future”, wrote curator Antonio Grulli.