Lucas and Tyra on living off-grid

“We talk a lot about how to define freedom,” Tyra Morten says, describing the creative process with her partner Lucas. Their work sits between sculpture, functional objects, and spatial intervention. “It may sound paradoxical, but the more we limit our physical space – the more we remove noise and outside influence – the freer we feel.”

Mirroring rather than imitating nature, the handmade objects explore qualities such as impermanence and transience. “In Sweden, the mindset is primarily Protestant. Everyone lives under the same set of societal norms,” says Lucas. “Most people don’t think about the poetic, the emotional – the things that truly make us human. And those are the things that spark something in us.”

Having met as teenagers, the studio evolved over time. After living together in New York, they moved to a small apartment in Lucas’ native town Varberg. That’s where their first objects were developed, but they always knew it was a stepping stone to something else. They wanted nature and space.

Over the years they looked at properties as far away as France, with one condition: it needed to be close to the ocean. “The more off-grid we are, the more freedom we experience,” Tyra explains. “Limitations become productive.”

For some, leaving cities such as Stockholm or Copenhagen might seem counterintuitive. For Lucas, it was the opposite. “I find it difficult to follow conventions simply because they are conventions,” he says. “There’s a social code in Stockholm that never suited us. Out here, that pressure disappears.”

Tyra and Lucas Morten outside their barn.

The farm appeared and disappeared from the market for years, but when they finally visited, their decision was immediate. “We let the property guide the way,” Lucas says. “We knew that wherever we ended up, we could build the world we want to live in. This was the strongest starting point we could find.”

The Mortens seem to approach their farm not as a finished idea, but as a long-term sculpture, shaped through daily work. The atelier was their first priority. While most people begin by renovating the house, they focused on the workspace – a studio with an adjoining kitchen, office, and sleeping loft. Much of it is built by hand. “We’ve insulated it with old hay from the loft,” Lucas says. “We’ve built a spiral staircase. We’ve finished most of the office. We have storage for works in progress and for pieces between exhibitions. It isn’t complete, but it functions.”

Professional builders were difficult to work with, largely because the couple questioned the speed-driven logic of contemporary construction. “Today everything needs to be fast and efficient,” Lucas explains. “That’s why concrete and plastic-based systems dominate. If you build a house now, the walls are filled with plastic insulation and coated with plastic paint. You end up with an environment that is sealed rather than breathing.”

Instead, they are experimenting with methods that require time: clay plaster, slow-grown timber, hemp insulation, and stone from the property. The intention is not nostalgia, but integrity. “Nature has its own tempo,” Lucas says. “If you force it, the quality suffers. Older materials lasted because they weren’t rushed. We want to understand that logic, not replicate history.”

A longer version of this interview can be read in issue 7 of The New Era magazine.