Maria Nyholm and Mikaela Midell

Maria Nyholm straddles the fine line between design and art, and also producing pure art itself. Dedicating her work mostly to techniques and materials with great plasticity like ceramics, clay building, and papier-mâché but also painting, print making and 3D-printing. Experimenting with a manual hands-on approach, she brings both history and future to the fore of her work. She has adopted the word ’Care’ as her guiding motto: fusing the mental with the emotional, the care for detailing and the experience of the user. All her work shows a keen awareness for environmental concerns, not the least in Turn that she designed together with Mikaela Midell for Designtorget. ’We were intrigued with the use of bended steel in furniture design. Why not adopt the same straightforwardness in a candelabra?’. Maria Nyholm studied at Nyckelviksskolan, a greenhouse for young designers found on the Lidingö island, Stockholm, before being admitted to Beckmans School of Design where she graduated 2022. She has been featured in the art hall Liljevalch’s Spring Salon.

Mikaela Midell graduated the same year with an exam project exploring how form and function can redefine scale and attain sculptural qualities. Her use of steel tubes in the elaborately formed clothes rack inspired her and Maria Nyholm to create Turn, a clean and stylish interpretation of the candelabra for modern times. ’I was fascinated in how you can bend and angle tubes to reinterpret traditional design typologies.’ Her appetite for exploring space has led her to scale up her ambitions and has steered her to a career in interior design architecture.