An artist’s role in the community, her motivation and skills
“It’s really hard when you’re a student … working in wood requires a lot of tools,” said Anna Erneholm. “It’s hard to just do it by yourself. It’s good to be at a school that has the equipment because it’s hard to start up and tools are expensive. … To be able to experiment somewhere where there are people who know the tools and you can use tools … you learn a lot.”
Sculptor Anna Erneholm was discussing the joys and frustrations of being a student artist.
As a teaching artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center for 15 years, she has a lot of knowledge about this.
Matriculating through the primary grades of education in her native country of Sweden, Anna said she loved to make art in school and spent all her free time in woodshop class. In college, she studied art and architecture at the Chalmers University of Technology and the Valand Art Academy, both in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Anna, whose sculptures encompass the figurative and the abstract recounted how good she had it. By the age of 10, she was able to start carving. She said she feels terrible for her students because schools here don’t even offer woodshop at any level any more. It’s unfortunate because as Anna explains, when she tells the students what she does and shows them her tools, they want to try it.
“And you can see certain kids that you know … they would love it,” said Anna.
“I have a degree in architecture, but I always wanted to do art. It’s still good to have [the degree] because there’s a lot of basic ideas about space and volumes … that you can learn in architecture and you can use it in art also.”
Teaching Artist Program
Anna is located in the “J” building art studios, which sit between the Marine Mammal Care Center and the Korean Bell at Angels Gate Park below this hill. The structure is home to three artist studios ― all sculptors.
Through the Artist-In-Classrooms program, she teaches third graders in San Pedro, Long Beach and Harbor City. Recently, she facilitated a workshop in making “newspaper towers”― structural sculptures on how to make the tallest tower.
“It was a lot of fun because it was adults and kids together helping each other. Some things were completely amazing. They looked like satellites. There are some challenges because of the material … [we] had just newspapers and masking tape, that was it. People made amazing things, very diverse. Since they’re big sheets, if you roll them up tight you can get these really long sticks, but then you have to connect them so that they don’t just start falling. You have to stabilize them. That was one that I want to do again because it was so much fun.”
In June, Anna taught the ArtLab Art & Marine Science and Workshop at the Marine Mammal Care Center for “Your Portrait as a Pinniped.” The MMCC educators discussed how and why it takes in pinnipeds in need. Then Anna led a pinniped diorama workshop in building an underwater oasis for pinnipeds at the MMCC. After constructing the 3D diorama base and drawing and coloring pinnipeds in the students’ likenesses, they suspended them in the “water” with a recycled fishing line.
The sculptor came to the States in 2000, after she met her husband who is from San Pedro, while he was traveling in Sweden.
Anna has worked in wood, stone clay and bronze. Nowadays she prefers mostly wood. Several of her graceful granite sculptures that she made in Sweden are displayed in her studio. She works in granite less now, because she needs very specific tools like a compressor and air power tools, which are hard on your body, because of vibration she said, and because even if you wear masks you breathe in dust. This is what led her to start working mainly in wood.
“I just love wood,” Anna said. “I love the process [and] material. When I started, I sometimes bought exotic wood. They are expensive but always come out good.”
People have been giving her avocado wood and carob wood. From the latter, she created a piece titled Liv. Like many of Anna’s sculptures, this piece is at once abstract and organic with surprising, beautiful, red and creamy white wood, with subtle black lines and knots. Liv encompasses movement and depth, amid almost concentric-like swirls progressing horizontally and upwards, balanced atop a stone block.
Eventually, she started receiving local wood more frequently. One day, a tree on Meyler and 25th Street had to be taken down and Anna got a phone call. The renowned Harold Greene, the noted furniture designer and builder and multi-instrumentalist musician/producer (Fortnight Concert Series) called Anna to tell her they were taking down a carob tree and to come on over. Greene is also an artist at AGCC.
Industrial Wood Envisaged as Art
Anna came to use plywood for many of her works, in both small and very large forms. She started with a tiny model, just a few inches tall, she made years ago that looks just like an ice cream swirl. She knew it was going to be a big sculpture, but she didn’t have the space for it. So, she expanded her studio by taking down a wall. Then she considered how she might bring a trunk from a tree inside. It became complicated. She didn’t want to deal with the knots and other things in the wood, so she decided to try to make the sculpture from plywood.
“I didn’t even know if you can carve plywood because of how the grain goes,” she said. “I [did] some experiments before I did the big one. I had leftover pieces of plywood at home and I glued them together. Then I carved it and it worked. Then these [lines] started popping out and I was completely mesmerized. When you start sanding it, it’s so amazing. Plywood has this thing where it’s straight. From above … you got this straight line, obviously … But not from the side [where] you get these really nice shapes … the grains go around the rings of the tree so from above, you see all these rings and then from every side, you’re going to have these nice shapes.”
The artist quipped she wanted to sculpt with plywood, a material known for its industrial uses, while making her “crazy shapes.” Anna’s large “ice cream” sculpture, titled Vi, took her two years during COVID, to create the approximately three to four-foot high piece. It’s made of 30 sheets of plywood that are glued together as a block — weighing about 400 pounds.
Anna switches between plywood and other woods, going between bigger and smaller pieces at the same time. She loves sculpting so much that if she stops for a while she starts feeling stressed.
“It feels like something is missing, like [I’m] stressed out or nervous,” she said. “Then I am back to it and it’s like, this is what I was missing.
“I appreciate the fluidity of clay; whatever you’re feeling just comes right out [in] the clay right away. But wood is the opposite. It’s so stiff and takes time. I like to translate this fluidity in the clay into wood … through me and see what happens. So when someone tells me that they think the big one looks like ice cream it’s good because that was my goal.”
At one point, Anna got inspiration from ancient goddess statues from Japan and the Middle East. She copied them in clay.
These pieces are in her studio. Anna explained she sees the figure as a picture, then she makes it because she wants to feel how they are made. From her imagination of an image, Anna noted she wouldn’t even know what it would look like from behind. But she made it because she liked how goddesses felt so strong and they don’t care if you like them or not.
“I just want to feel, what is this?” she said. “They are strong in themselves. I wanted to get access to that and how are these sculptures made to have that in them?”
Photo’s by Arturo Garcia-Ayala
Recently, Anna has been curious about hanging sculptures, which interest her because “once you hang the sculpture, it moves because it wants to find balance.
“How do you create one so that it’s going to hang the way you want it to? Maybe you don’t want to hang straight down. Maybe I wanted to have a curve. [I] have to think about that. It’s interesting because then you don’t have a base. It’s floating. So it changes what you can do, but you have to have it attached upwards instead somehow, so it’s a different way of working.”
These days Anna is more into creating than promoting her work. When asked if she goes through phases doing one or the other more, she confessed, “I go through phases where I’m thinking that I should do more but then when I come to my studio … I’m just working. It’s just the making of it, the process of it. It just feels like I have a lot more pieces that I want to make.”
Once she decides on a piece, she has about five months to work on it. She has to take her time, that’s her process. Most of her sales are private or from people who find her randomly, for example, on Instagram, as one woman did recently.
“She’s been coming by, buying things, which is amazing because I can’t sell for cheap,” Anna said. “I’m just going to keep it. So, I feel better [when] people come in for Open Studios.
“Angels Gate is good because they have shows here; they have shows in the downtown San Pedro area and they [ask] us, [do] you want to be in a show? [They] also push us in other ways to promote [our work] so, that’s really good. And it’s fun to exhibit … I should do it more often.
On Sept. 21, Anna will lead a free Family Art Workshop doing wood stick sculptures at AGCC.
Details: www.instagram.com/annaerneholm and www.angelsgateart.org/artist/anna-erneholm-2