Eva
Fidjeland

Glass artist working at the intersection of light, lead, and form — making the transient permanent, one panel at a time.

Orrefors, Sweden · Est. 1989

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A life shaped by
light and geography

Born in Stockholm in 1955, Eva Fidjeland spent her formative years moving across four continents — Portugal, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran — before encountering the ancient craft of stained glass in the artist village of Ein Hod, Israel, in 1978.

Under the guidance of Professor Joseph Chaaltiel, she learned the centuries-old tradition of lead caming — the practice of joining coloured glass with strips of lead to form both window and sculpture. What she found was not a technique but a language.

She continued her studies at Konstakademien, the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, before establishing Eva Fidjeland Glas at the former Orrefors railway station in 1989. Her work has since been commissioned for public buildings, private collections, and international exhibitions in Sweden, Germany, and Greece.

In addition to glass, Eva works across photography, digital art, and performance, and has published two collections of poetry. She is a member of Sveriges Konstnärsnämnden and of Hantverksgruppen De 20 in Växjö, where she maintains a shop and gallery.

STUDIO PORTRAIT

Restoring light to
a 17th-century warship

In 1989, Eva Fidjeland received one of the most singular commissions of her career: to reconstruct the glass details of the royal warship Vasa, ahead of the museum's inauguration.

The Vasa sank on her maiden voyage in 1628, a few minutes after leaving Stockholm harbour. She was salvaged in 1961, and the extraordinary work of preservation and reconstruction occupied Swedish craftspeople for three decades. When the Vasa Museum opened in 1990, Eva's glass work was among the details that returned something of the ship's original presence — light caught and refracted through period-accurate materials, connecting the present to a catastrophe nearly four centuries past.

The commission drew on everything she had learned in Ein Hod and Stockholm: knowledge of historical glazing methods, the metallurgy of lead, and the optical properties of mouth-blown glass. It remains a landmark of her practice.

1628
Vasa sinks on maiden voyage, Stockholm harbour
1961
Salvage operation raises the warship intact
1978
Eva Fidjeland learns stained glass at Ein Hod, Israel
1989
Commissioned to reconstruct glass details for the Vasa
1990
Vasa Museum inaugurated, Stockholm
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Words drawn from
glass and myth

Eva Fidjeland's literary work is inseparable from her visual art — both rooted in transformation, ancient femininity, and the light that passes through material.

2007
Metamorfos

Eva's literary debut, a meditation on transformation illustrated with her own paintings. The poems move through states of change — glass cooling in lead, light shifting through colour, the self in transit across continents and decades.

2009
Astartes mage

Named for the ancient Near Eastern goddess Astarte, this spiral-bound collection connects Eva's Middle Eastern childhood to feminine mythology and cyclical time. Accompanied by her own photography.

Explore the collections

Commissioned works
in glass and light

Each panel is made by hand at the Orrefors studio — mouth-blown glass shaped by lead and illuminated by whatever light the day provides.

Leaded panel, 2019
Leaded panel, 2019
Sculptural form, 2021
Sculptural form, 2021
Commission, Tasmania
Commission, Tasmania
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The old railway station,
Orrefors

The studio occupies the former Orrefors railway station — a building shaped by industrial purpose and now given over entirely to the slow, patient work of glass.

Eva has worked from this space since 1989, in a village renowned for its crystal glassworks. The juxtaposition is apt: where Orrefors Crystal produces decorative objects by the thousand, Eva Fidjeland Glas produces singular pieces for specific places and people.

She teaches on the design programme at Folkuniversitetet in Lund, and her work is available through Hantverksgruppen De 20 in Växjö, a cooperative gallery and shop run by twenty Swedish craftspeople.

Eva Fidjeland Glas
Leths gata 3
380 40 Orrefors
Sweden
Orrefors380 40