Iris Smeds: From high school drop out to daring performance artist

Iris Smeds dropped out of high school at 16, determined to become an artist. Perhaps unsurprisingly given her inexperience at the time - and despite both of her parents working in theatre - a career in the arts didn't happen overnight. Instead, she says, she spent the next few years in Stockholm "working at a coffeeshop, writing poetry and loitering around."

Things may have gotten off to a slow start, but today Smeds is one of the most exciting artists in Sweden. Her work around identity, often involving video art and bold performance pieces such as her one-woman punk band project Vaska Fimpen, has audiences across the globe paying attention.

Related: Artist Charlotte Gyllenhammar on dark Nordic fairytales and being boring

Despite her early determination to become an artist, it was a meandering path that got her here. After the period spent "loitering" she went to Idun Lovén, a preparatory art school, and a year later applied to the Royal Institute of Art but was rejected. She nevertheless began writing screenplays for performance art centre Dramalabbet and decided to just hang out at the Institute regardless. "People though I was a student there," she says. "All my friends went to art school or were artists."

She started to do poetry readings in art spaces, "and then I started to bring a giant porcelain dog to the readings," she says, "and I guess I eventually became a performance artist, and by that, an artist."

This interest in performance has now manifested in Vaska Fimpen, which loosely translates to Pan the Cigarette Butt. As Fimpen, Smeds - often scantily clad in a pink silk negligée and ripped tights - strums a guitar and recites a mix of lyrics and spoken word poetry, written by the artist. To be in her presence is an experience.

Yet beyond the shock and awe of Fimpen's no-holds-barred style of performance lies an intricate artistry, where Smeds weaves stories into fully-fledged narratives waiting to be explored by the viewer. "The art of writing, text, prose, means everything," she says. "When I was younger, I struggled with the question of the image and the word, and which of them is stronger. Doing performance is a way they can just blend."

There's a dynamism to performance art that constantly intrigues Smeds. "A script is something ongoing, still in process. I don’t won’t stuff to dry, stand still," she says, although she has recently begun experimenting in sculpture. "I still see the sculptures more as performers in a scene or props," she says, noting that she incorporates them into larger installations and productions.

Related: Art after death: in conversation with artist Yngvild Saeter

Smeds has recently embarked on a huge artistic undertaking, with the intention for the work to span many years. "I am working on a big project that I started in 2021, entitled 'The Little House in the Food Court’," she says. The film project is about a queer theatre group with the ambition to stage The Little House on The Prairie as a play in the food court of an abandoned shopping mall. The theatre group aims to create scenes confronting and renegotiating the different dynamics and power structures within a family constellation. "Last Autumn I made three different scenes that were filmed and executed as performances about family in sculptural installations," she says. "Through the project I want to discuss the family as an institution and theatre, but also to work with film at a different, much slower pace, to develop a method where set design can work as installation and performance, where the text and production bleed into one another."

The project is dear to the artist on many levels. "Creating a family with my partner Julia was pretty much the starting point for my new project," she says. "The process a queer family often goes through juxtaposes the idea of how a family is constructed. I was a bit shocked that the whole maternity and early childcare system sees the carrier of the child as primary parent, a label that neither I nor my partner cared for."

Despite some initial uncertainty, having a child was "the ultimate love shock" she says. "Until recently my obsession has been this Netflix kid show, about Heidi, an orphan Alp girl, that we watched incessantly with our daughter. Julia and I would even summarise episodes we missed to each other."

Related: Watch 'A Bath In My Mother’s Womb' a new dance film that explores the first moments of life

Nevertheless, Smeds says the experiences they went through in the creation of her family has led her to feel like greater society is entering a new type of conservatism, "an era where everyone is a 'mom-fluencer', stuck in the little house on the prairie selling the image of their family," as she puts it. With this as a backdrop, it will be fascinating to see how her new project takes shapes over the coming months and years.

Iris Smeds' most recent work, 'The Zombie Function, 2021' is included in the group exhibition: 'framför, vid, under - in front of, next to, under' curated by Emily Fahlén, at Varbergs Konsthall, Engelbrektsgatan 7, Varberg, and is on view until 1 May, 2022.