Yoga

Lisa Larson's yoga sculptures represent her creativity at its most personal level. Four sculptures playing with light and shadows, embodying the urge to truly connect with oneself. For decades, they sat in her studio serving as a gentle reminder: do your yoga! And indeed, Lisa practiced her yoga exercises to cultivate a sensuous connection with her inner self. Mind, body, and spirit united in movement. Lisa Larson truly captured the essence of yoga in her unglazed and raw figurines, striving for that perfect balance.

“It is hard to describe with words; it just goes with the body and how it moves fully naturally. You might be stressed and exhausted, and then you just put all problems and grievances away, and you lay still, breathing slowly. Yoga kept me in shape,” Lisa Larson recalls.

The world-renowned ceramicist was an early adopter of yoga and its underlying philosophy when it was first introduced in Sweden in the late ’70s. She rallied her colleagues at Gustavsberg and her young children, urging them to take the bus into the heart of Stockholm, where the yoga class was held in the living room of a large apartment. But back home, she faced a challenge: how to recall the movements to master the tripod headstand, the boat pose, or the hare? Her figurines capture this journey, offering a sculptural balance between tension and relaxation.

“I remember the silence in that big living room, how to sink into, and enjoy a posture for several minutes, all just to relax. Yoga brought me an untroubled calm, and it was also linked to contemplation, to reach down to a calmness, to a blissful rest.”

The Yoga figurines are a clear departure from Lisa Larson’s more decorative work. “Her Yoga practice followed her through life,” says Anders Färdig, founder of Design House Stockholm. “The Yoga figurines don’t idolize beauty but extol one’s inner balance and strength, treating the body as an expression of mental well-being. We loved them the moment we saw them in her studio because of their sensuality. This is true emotional functionality. She herself saw the exercises as a contribution to a rhythm and a balance in life itself.”

"Clay is such a wonderful material; it's so malleable. I enjoy it incredibly when I get it just right," says Lisa Larson. "In my mind, the figurines capture both endurance and relaxation, movement and calmness."

Margot Barolo, Design Director at Design House Stockholm has herself a background in ceramic craft and worked in close collaboration with Lisa Larson to adapt the studio pieces from 1982 into a larger production. “We had many discussions about how bodies change and behave in motion,” says Margot Barolo about her visits to Lisa Larson’s studio, “We needed to adapt her pieces to how the slightly pigmented stoneware will shrink during the firing, since we had to ensure that the proportions of the originals were kept unaltered.”

Lisa Larsons’s crafty artwork made her a household name in Sweden as early as the ’50s, but also abroad, especially in Japan. At 23 years of age, Lisa Larson was handpicked to work for Gustavsberg Porcelain Factory. Granted freedom to create in her own studio, her initial one-year assignment turned into a 26-year journey, creating unique sculptures and figurines produced in larger series. In 1980, she ventured into freelancing, expanding her craft even further. Her studio, rich with public works, also held many hidden treasures, including unfinished projects and personal keepsakes.

The stylized bodies of the Yoga figurines are pragmatic and straightforward, beyond any aesthetic presumptions. The plump and roundish human shapes stand in sharp contrast to the vigorous tensile forces in an exercise. Grounded and highlighted on their little woven bamboo mats, the Yoga figurines serve as reminders. Just as a clock tells us the time or an armchair offers rest, these sculptures speak to our inner selves as a gentle reminder to strive for inner balance.