Reykjavík Grapevine - 23.05.2014, Qupperneq 32

32 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 06 — 2014ART
Not For The Faint-Hearted
Jónborg ‘Jonna’ Sigurðardóttir takes
unconventional to another level
A Thoughtful Maverick
“Everybody knows who I am in Akureyri
and they think ‘she's an artist and she can
be strange,’” she says of her status in the
tight community in North Iceland. This
reputation follows from the installations
and art pieces that she has been crafting
for the last 20 years. Not that she would
care if it were otherwise. “I do what I
want when I want and I use whatever
material I feel like using,” she says of her
decision to use things like table leftovers,
female sanitary products, clay, glass,
plastic bags and fresh meat.
She is not trying to be scandalous just
for the sake of it, though. “It's important
that artists have a message, so people
take a pause to reflect on their lives and
break the fast pace of their life, and that's
what I try to do myself. However, not
every artist has to be political, some do
pretty things that are enjoyable to look at
and that is fair, too,” she explains.
Jónborg prefers her installations to
be audacious. “Fifteen years ago, I felt
like using tampons, so I dipped some in
acrylic and went on to picture Akurey-
rikirkja [the Akureyri church]. The Church
is very masculine and I wanted to portray
it with women’s menstrual blood. Show-
ing it in a feminine way gives the church
purity and peacefulness,” she says. The
tampon dots give a pointillism impression
of the grand church, though not exactly in
a Georges Seurat manner.
Her “Gaga Moment”
“This time around, I worked with food
leftovers. For two months, I had put all my
household's table surpluses in the freezer,
and the quantity was unbelievable. And I
used to throw that away,” she says.
So she decided to test how she could
use that food as the prime material of
her next project. “I've put cheese, meat,
vegetables, you name it, in plastic bags
and I've let it all to rot to see what colour
it would turn to, monitoring its evolution
through the passing weeks.” The result
fashions an amazing sight: a glass frame
filled with dozens of food squares packed
on top of each other and framed in glass,
creating a colourful mosaic that melts
and rots as the bacteria takes over and as
gravity does its thing.
The message she wanted to convey
is clear: “Acquiring all that crap is not
important, as we all start naked and we'll
all be dust at the end of it,” she says. “We
have a special environment in Iceland and
we have to take care of it, to stop what's
going on, the exploitation, or it will all turn
bad on us.”
Thus, the crumbling canvas evolves
and is getting greener and more sordid,
the message getting louder and louder.
She also embraces her concern for Ice-
land's nature. “I've put many big Icelandic
company logos on windows and then
dirtied them up with clay. I'm giving them
shit for taking away our land, which we
sold to them stupidly,” she explains.
Plastic surgery has been another
question she's wanted to tackle for some
time now. “The emphasis on glamour is
silly. It's ridiculous that doctors get paid
and waste time on making bigger boobs
or more aesthetic vaginas,” she says of
the growing trends. “They should be sav-
ing lives and helping people in need.”
Thus, she sewed together a 30-40
centimetre (depending on its rotting
stage) super realistic female genitalia out
of meat in her kitchen with three nurse
friends. “It's rotting in a glass box now,
showing how we'll all end up anyway.
People have to realise it,” she says.
The mischievous smile on her face
summarises it all: strong imagery is the tip
of her wisdom iceberg.
While conformity isn’t what typically comes to mind when thinking of contemporary Ice-
landic designers, Akureyri's Jónborg Sigurðardóttir took unconventional to another level,
once again, with Flóðbylgja (‘Tsunami’), her latest art installation that was displayed at
Ketilhúsið from March 1 through April 6. Flóðbylgja is a reflection on over-consumption
and our object-glorifying society. Intrigued by the exhibition's promotional self-portrait
(which she entitled ‘Jonna Crowned With Trash,’ for the sake of this interview), I got in
touch with Jónborg and luckily she was passing through Reykjavík and could answer
some of my questions.
facebook.com/Ketilhusid-
Listagili-Akureyri
Ketilhúsið, AkureyriMarch 1 - April 6
Flóðbylgja
Tsunami
Words
Fred Q. Labelle
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