Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.05.2016, Blaðsíða 22

Like a fresh breeze heralding the
change in seasons, a group exhibi-
tion entitled ‘The Weather Diaries’
blew into Reykjavík’s Nordic House
this spring. Stepping inside its mut-
ed, grey-green confines is like enter-
ing another world. Spread across four
rooms, the show is an atmospheric
and mesmerising collection of texts,
sculpture, video, and installed cloth-
ing, interlinked by a series of paint-
erly, dreamlike photographs of figures
in dim North Atlantic landscapes.
Set amongst works by Greenlan-
dic, Faroese and Icelandic designers,
the show’s centrepiece is a delicate
dress that hangs suspended in the
air, surrounded by an installation of
small fabric clouds. It draws you into
its orbit with a subtle and powerful
magnetism, seeming to spin, slowly,
like a galaxy of snowflakes frozen in a
single moment. Something about the
piece, and the show as a whole, seems
to get under your skin, like the perva-
sive cold of a drizzly autumn day. It’s
an intoxicating exhibition that creates
the feeling of a place at once familiar
and unlike any other.
A few days later, having lingered
over the pages of the show’s catalogue,
I visit the studio of Steinunn Sig-
urðardóttir, the designer behind the
dress installation. It’s a warm early-
summer afternoon, and people flit in
and out of a nearby ice cream parlour,
casting long shadows over the slanted
blue store facades of Grandi. Inside
Steinunn's place, it’s quiet, and the air
is cool. Mannequins stand in a loose
throng at one end of the space under a
silver STEiNUNN logo, amongst tables
of carefully placed accessories and
a scattering of artworks and photo-
graphs. At the other end of the studio,
behind some meticulously arranged
bookshelves, sits the svelte, black-clad
figure of Steinunn, typing and pick-
ing at a salad, her glasses perched on
the end of her nose. She looks up, and
beckons me inside. “Hello,” she cries.
“Welcome to my little world.”
THROUGH THE
LOOKING GLASS
A brief tour of Steinunn’s studio re-
veals her many nature-inspired cloth-
ing designs, and a treasure trove of
interesting artefacts that provide
insight into her process. She talks
enthusiastically about the milieu of
friends and colleagues behind the
sculptures, records, books and pho-
tographs. My eyes settle on a book by
Cooper & Gorfer, the curators of ‘The
Weather Diaries’. It is, in fact, the first
volume the artist-curators made as a
duo, entitled ‘SEEK Volume 1’—an ex-
quisitely produced edition that charts
the two journeying across Iceland, sev-
eral years ago.
“The show was created for the third
Nordic Fashion Biennale,” explains
Steinunn, “and I was the lucky one who
got to help the Nordic House find the
curators. The reason I fell in love with
Cooper & Gorfer was that, to me, this
book shows exactly what you need to
do—you need to get out there and do the
research. You can see it in their diary. It
was a journey—a beautiful journey.”
I leaf through the book, absorbing
the rich, generous detail: sketches,
footnotes, photographs, scanned re-
ceipts, and scraps of paper, all flesh-
ing out their experience of Iceland.
“There’s a pönnukökur recipe in
there,” Steinunn remarks, “and inter-
views with Einar Örn and Finnbogi
Pétursson. They used Arctic Paper—
a very fine Swedish paper. When you
combine such good crafts and ele-
ments together—that’s when you re-
ally know what you’re doing. I think
22
all of the designers in ‘The Weather
Diaries’ had that quality. They each
started with a tradition, and then took
it further.”
CREATING
STITCHES
Today, Steinunn operates primar-
ily as a fashion designer, but the job
title hardly seems to do justice to her
range. She has also taught workshops,
curated an exhibition on Icelandic sil-
versmithing, and is undergoing stud-
ies in ethnography. But her path began
with a deceptively simple and quintes-
sentially Icelandic tradition: knitting.
“I’m a perfect example of a skill
that was passed down,” she explains.
“My grandmother taught me knit-
ting. I know everything about it, and
I’m an avid knitter. I only realised it
was something special when I began my
studies at Parsons, and I realised that I
knew much more about knitting than
my teachers. I was creating stitches. I
almost felt like I was cheating, because
knitting felt so natural to me. After a
couple of months, they sent me out onto
Seventh Avenue in New York City.”
Steinunn lived and worked in New
York for over a decade, developing and
applying her skills, and meeting many
interesting people along the way. “It
was the 1980s—it was crazy,” she says.
“But what people loved was the craft of
the knitting. That’s what I tell my stu-
dents, when I teach—that you have to
bring something to the table.”
EXPLORATION
AND DISCOVERY
Her respect for craft, and experi-
ence collaborating with creative
people across disciplines, has led to
Steinunn’s particularly artistic per-
spective of what fashion can be. It’s
MAGIC
HAPPENS
Inside the STEiNUNN studio
Words John Rogers
Photos Art Bicnick