Five questions to Roland Persson about Being Mortal Hurts

On April 5 2025, we open the doors to Stockholm-based artist Roland Persson and his major solo exhibition Being Mortal Hurts at Färgfabriken. The exhibition is a mid-career presentation covering 25 years of creation, and gives a unique insight into Persson’s visual world through his silicone sculptures. We asked him five quick questions about his art, the exhibition and his choice of silicone as a material.

Why is the exhibition called Being Mortal Hurts?

Because it opens up to something fundamental and it’s in a way concrete but also poetic. Of course, it also focuses us on vulnerability and what it does to us.

What can visitors expect from the exhibition?

Poetry, painting, sensitivity, nature, human objects, brutality, helplessness, dreams, sculptures, uncanny feelin’, death, attempts at life, etc.

What inspired you to start working with silicone as the main material for your sculptures?

I was looking for a material that could hold color, I painted sculptures in aluminum before but did not like that it was painted on. I found transparent silicone and from that I could mix color into the material itself. It was so incredibly formable that it was uncanny, disgusting and low in a way, a slippery anti-material and a low material considered as a sculpture material.

How does an artistic process start for you?

Very different, sometimes as a simple thought, like “Drömrummen”; what would it be like to go into rooms where everything is in silicone, everything is transformed into a different material than what it looks like, and that’s where the process starts.

Sometimes it starts as an idea of a movement e.g. that everything should flow downwards that everything just falls and is pulled down by gravity and then comes the objects, the story.

Sometimes I find objects to mold from from that a thought process starts. Sometimes it all starts with a title of a book or something I read, often poetry, or a picture I see, it simply looks very different.

How has your artistic process evolved over time, from your early works to your recent exhibitions?

Not so much I think, the things that develop are different techniques. I decided about 25 years ago to work with silicone as a material and I have continued to do so, the world of ideas and concepts is based on an idea of turning it into silicone.

The exhibition Being Mortal Hurts is on display in the Main Hall at Färgfabriken between April 5 and June 15, 2025. Read more about the exhibition here.