Skull Utensil by Tobias Birgersson

Artist list

Tobias Birgersson

In Skull Utensil, the meal becomes a reminder of both life and death. Every meal is prepared with love, skill, and out of necessity. It keeps us alive. At the same time, bite by bite, it brings us closer to death.

The exhibition brings together hot-forged utensils and iron skulls, hand-engraved copper skulls, graphic prints, drawings, and fine art photography. The engravings were created in collaboration with Pierce Healy, the graphic prints with Leia Birgersson, and the fine art photographs with Christian Habetzeder.

Working across iron, wood, copper, and graphic media, Birgersson explores contradictory relationships—between care and impermanence, and between the practical object and the symbolic.

Tobias Birgersson is an artist and object maker whose primary media are metal, forging and wood. His artistic practice often begins with familiar forms—tools, utensils, and functional objects—as a way of exploring the relationships between function, material, and meaning.

His practice spans art, craft, design, and public art. He exhibits and curates exhibitions both in Sweden and internationally. Birgersson’s work is represented in the collections of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and he is a co-founder of Galleri LOD in Stockholm.

As part of the European collaborative project IronNotes, co-funded by the European Union, Birgersson has worked on Grave Marker – Forging Future Remembrance, an artistic research project exploring forging, cultures of remembrance, and new approaches to grave markers. This engagement with memory, ritual, and death also became one of the seeds for Skull Utensil.
Tobias Birgersson is a Senior Lecturer at Campus Steneby, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, and has taught at the university level since 2007.

The artist is a guest artist at Gallery Four Umeå while exhibiting at Röbäck. 


Opening Reception: Sunday, September 6, 1 PM
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Friday, 12–6 PM
Saturday, 11 AM–4 PM

Exhibition on view through September 26.