The last Masonite slab

A decade of exploration and design in the wooden board Masonite is on display at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. The book is also published in conjunction with the exhibition Production short stories.  

"We live in a time when we have less and less knowledge about how manufacturing is done. The fact that historically there has been a direct connection between an industry and the people, traditions and material resources of the place is easily forgotten," says Anna Holmquist, founder of Folkform, together with Chandra Ahlsell.

Sweden's last Masonite factory was located in Rundvik in Västerbotten. It closed in 2011. "Masonite" has become synonymous with a whole range of different types of wooden boards. 

This exhibition takes its starting point from the furniture design of the design duo Folkform in the last records of the Masonite brand, spelled with a capital “M” and an “e” at the end, a wood fiber material that was manufactured at the factory in Rundvik. The exhibition shows, among other things, a series of cabinet furniture and other objects in Masonite designed by Folkform. Each cabinet is a collage of Masonite from different eras and a monument to the last Masonite factory in Sweden.

The factory was built in 1929 and during its 82-year production history, materials were manufactured for everything from bed bases, boats, sports cabins, wall panels and ceilings in residential buildings, as well as boards for the Masonite pavilion at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930. After the factory closed in 2011, the machines from the Rundvik factory were moved to Thailand, where a new factory has been built from the old machine parts. “With the closure of the last factory in Sweden, Masonite boards became history and a cultural heritage,” says Anna Holmquist. 

The industrial craftsmanship that Folkform had documented during the factory process now also took on a different function. The images and short memoirs from experiences of production, the so-called production short stories, became historical documents of a production.

For each factory the art and design duo Folkform has worked with (2005-2023), they have documented the manufacturing process, primarily in collaboration with documentary photographer Magnus Laupa. In conjunction with the exhibition, this material is published for the first time in book form, Production short stories. 

The publication also constitutes Anna Holmquist's dissertation in artistic research. (The defense will take place at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts on April 14th.) 

The book primarily depicts production at the Masonite factory, but also production from other manufacturing industries. The finished objects are shown with the materials they are made of. Documentation and reflections on the process of creating the final products are presented together with images – creating the so-called production novels. 

About Folkform

Folkform was founded by Anna Holmquist and Chandra Ahlsell in 2005. The duo met at Konstfack in Stockholm and their design studio has worked to highlight Swedish cultural and craft heritage since its inception. Holmquist and Ahlsell's designs take inspiration from traditional industrial materials and manufacturing techniques with which they create innovative production processes, often with surprising choices of materials. Folkform has received the Bruno Mathsson Prize in 2019 and was awarded the Scandinavian Design Awards 2023 as designer of the year.