Ingela Ihrman – Frutti di Mare

Ingela Ihrman’s art playfully investigates the human condition. Blending humour with vulnerability, she addresses themes of identity and belonging by examining other life forms and our connections to them. Her work often centers on intense emotions rooted in everyday experience—desire, yearning, and solitude.

Frutti di Mare is her biggest solo exhibition so far, shown at Malmö Konsthall.
Using sculptural costumes, Ihrman physically transforms into other species, using these altered forms to probe the boundaries and possibilities of her own body. What does it mean to inhabit another being? How is selfhood shaped within a physical form? And how does the body influence both how we perceive the world and how we are perceived? Ihrman considers her performances to be shared experiences, creating social encounters where the audience and the artist engage in the work together.

For the graphic identity of the exhibition, Ingela wished to eliminate all wall texts—leading us to the solution of creating a map that would contain all the necessary information and using illustrations to be able to decode each art work. Drawing inspiration from her work with algae, we developed a bold typographic headline that mimics bladderwrack seaweed. The colour palette was kept simple, using only two tones: one Pantone colour printed monochromatically on coloured paper.