Tone Vigeland, Norwegian jewellery designer and sculptor inspired by nature and landscape – obituary

Tone Vigeland, who has died aged 85, was a Norwegian jewellery designer, silversmith and sculptor whose work ranged from minimalist bracelets and necklaces inspired by nature and avidly collected by celebrities such as such as Marianne Faithfull, to monumental pieces of public sculpture that sat seamlessly in the rugged Nordic landscape.

Tone Vigeland came to prominence as a studio jeweller in the early 1960s – she always rejected the opportunity for making mass-production pieces – honing a union of form, with repetitions of organic and geometric motifs, and a monochromatic palette of silver, steel and other materials. For inspiration, she looked to medieval chain-mail and traditional Viking crafts.

The result was a kind of anti-jewellery; her pieces were almost confrontational. Yet they also inspired a nervous tactility: intriguing like the spiky surface of a pinecone or the jagged rhythms on a rockface.

In the late 1970s, Tone Vigeland’s aesthetic was linked to the Punk movement. She picked up “on the artistic potential in what others would regard as junk,” noted her biographer Cecilie Malm Brundtland. But metal and line dictated her design ethic, rather than fashion.

Discussing her “feather” series – featuring sharp-edged sprays and quills – she emphasised its accidental origins: “A friend from Bergen came to me with a set of black iron nails. I found that when I hammered them flat, they had a lovely character – almost like black feathers. First, I discovered the material, and then I found a design to suit it.”

Tone Vigeland was born on August 6 1938 in Oslo into one of Norway’s great artistic dynasties. Her great-uncle was the figurative sculptor Gustav Vigeland, who created a famous installation of works in Oslo’s Frogner Park. Tone’s paternal grandfather, and Gustav’s rival, was Emanuel Vigeland, whose church decorations included paintings, stained glass and frescoes. Her father was also a successful church artist.

Following studies at the Norwegian National College of Art, Craft and Design in the late-1950s, and a subsequent goldsmithing course, she worked for several years at the artists collective PLUS in Fredrikstad before striking out on her own in 1963.

On visits to London, Tone Vigeland would wander around the British Museum – “you could get lost in dim corners and feast your eyes on arrowheads,” she recalled – and through the galleries of the V&A (two Vigeland pieces now sit in its permanent collection).

Tone Vigeland’s shift to sculptural works and installations came in the mid-1990s after the directors of Galleri Riis in Oslo suggested that she make an object for exhibition. That piece – a mesh of copper, nickel-plate and bronze resembling a mass of primordial moss – was followed by a solo show. A permanent refocus, away from jewellery design to sculpture, followed.

As with her jewellery, Tone Vigeland’s sculpture often echoed natural phenomena: trees in the wind, a murmuration of birds. For one series she hammered shrouds of lead around stones; for another she formed beetle-like creatures from doodles of steel.

Her final work, a huge curlicue of steel and bronze, was presented in 2022 to Kistefos sculpture park outside Oslo, where it now weaves between silver birches.

Home life and studio work coexisted in an Arts-and-Crafts house built by her grandparents in 1908 in the quiet neighbourhood of Slemdal on the fringes of Oslo. Her grandfather’s extraordinary mausoleum, Tomba Emmanuelle, sat on the neighbouring plot.

Malm Brundtland recalled visiting the artist at home, wearing a necklace by another designer. “Tone opened the door, stared at my necklace and quite abruptly said that if I wanted to come in the necklace should – immediately – be hung in the hallway. It could be picked up when leaving her house. For her, it was impossible to allow things into her house that violated her aesthetic sense.”

Tone Vigeland’s works are in the holdings of MoMA in New York and Musée des Arts Décoratif in Paris. She was made  a Commander of the Order of St Olav in 1996. Tone Vigeland: Jewellery and Sculpture – Movements in Silver was published in 2004.

In 1963, Tone Vigeland married Altle Rønning Arnesen, a physician. The marriage was later dissolved and she is survived by their two daughters.

Tone Vigeland, born August 6 1938, died March 18 2024