Urns

"One of Sivert's more enigmatic objects – or perhaps sculptures – are his urns. They are enlarged containers, placed in public spaces as if they were everyday objects that had suddenly outgrown their human proportions. They evoke a strange mix of recognition and wonder. We recognize the form, but no longer the scale. We know what an urn is, but when it becomes this large, it simultaneously begins to resemble something else.

A vase? A vessel? A body?

Sivert's urns appear in various materials and with different surface treatments. Sometimes we encounter the rust-brown surface, where the cast iron has been left outdoors, slowly surrendered to rain, air, and time. The formation of rust then becomes not only a technical process but also part of the work's expression. The surface changes, ages, and leaves traces of its own exposure. At other times, the urns are chemically patinated in green, as if to evoke the slow transformation of verdigris copper.

The material carries time.
Perhaps this is also why the urn is such a charged object. Historically and culturally, it has come to be associated with the human body as the vessel of the soul, with the transience of life, and with the memory of what once was. Already in antiquity, urns were used in connection with cremation, and through the centuries, the object has been imbued with religious, philosophical, and existential meanings.

The urn is a container, but also an image of humanity.
A body that carries something invisible within itself. A temporary vessel for life, consciousness, or soul. When life ceases, that which was living leaves its container, while the vessel remains. From this perspective, the urn becomes a physical and sensory embodiment of what can no longer be held onto – a protective form for what remains of earthly existence.

But what do Sivert's urns actually represent?
I have not found any unambiguous explanation. And perhaps it is precisely this absence of a given answer that makes them interesting. The urns seem to keep their meaning open. They offer themselves as vessels for our own ideas and memories. We can only speculate about what they stand as a reminder of: death, life, the body, memory, or perhaps something that lies beyond these opposites.
The form reinforces this ambivalence.

Sivert's urns narrow downwards and widen upwards – or vice versa, depending on how the gaze moves across the form. There is a kind of movement or 'pulse in the material,' where the volume seems to expand and contract. They are not entirely round. Rather, they are lip-shaped, almost organic. The form brings to mind something bodily: an opening, a mouth, a breath.
And they lack lids.
Instead, they are open to the sky.
That makes a crucial difference. The traditional urn is easily associated with enclosure, with the preservation of what no longer exists. Sivert's urn, however, does not seem to want to close itself. It does not hold fast. It opens itself. It is not confining but inviting.
Perhaps it is precisely there that the work's existential charge arises – in the tension between the container and what can no longer be contained.

The urn is empty, yet never empty. Its meaning arises in the encounter between the form and the viewer, between the material and the imagined. What might be sacred perhaps does not reside in the urn itself, but in what we imagine it can hold.
Sivert's urns thus become not just containers for something.
They become containers for thought."
/JÖ

Please visit Järngjuteriet i Småland.
https://mansarpsgjuteri.se/