Orrefors Crystal Designers

In the late 1970s, Orrefors established scholarship programs at Konstfack (the College of Arts and Crafts, Stockholm) and other colleges to promote glass design and glassmaking. Helen Krantz was one of the first scholarship winners. In her year in the Orrefors program, she fell in love with glass and determined to make it her life work. After graduation from Konstfack and her studies in glass and ceramics, she joined Orrefors full time. Helen's body of work at Orrefors has largely focused on forms and collections that developed out of her explorations of the possibilities in art glass. She often works with unorthodox tools and in patterns of small images to give the glass what she terms "rhythm." Since her debut at Orrefors, Helen has shown in solo and group exhibitions representing the fnest of Swedish glass through Sweden, Europe, North and South America and Japan. Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Rohsska Museum of Applied Arts and other collections.