Reykjavík Grapevine - 02.06.2017, Side 28

dancer in a group called The Ice-
breakers. I studied piano and vio-
lin, but rehearsing by myself was
so not what I wanted. I realised I
was never going to be an excep-
tional soloist, and I was like ‘fuck
that.’ So I gave up violin for break-
dancing.”
It was the first in a series of un-
expected swerves. Another came
when, after graduating high
school, Hrafnhildur decided to
avoid the obvious by enrolling in
a business course. “It was a very
strange decision, in retrospect,”
she smiles. “I’ve always had this
tendency to go in the opposite di-
rection that I should be going, and
to struggle against the perception
of what’s cool.” She quickly gravi-
tated back towards art, ultimately
graduating with a BFA in painting.
LIFE IN COLOUR
When the graduation trip took
Hrafnhildur to New York City, she
felt drawn to the city and applied
for the School of Visual Arts in
Manhattan. “I loved it immediate-
ly,” she says. “It was the rawness,
youngness, and positivity. It was
like a rough diamond. I wanted to
be part of the bigger world.”
Having travelled widely in Europe,
she first considered studying in
Barcelona, Holland and Germany,
but felt that they were dogged by the
baggage of art history. “I realised at
some point that when I was envi-
sioning my life in Europe, I was see-
ing it in black and white,” she says,
“and when I thought about New York
it was always in bright colours. So I
went to the colour.”
The other students in her class
brought paintings, sketches, and
equipment with them. Hrafnhildur
arrived armed with just her accumu-
lation of ideas, and a strong desire
to evolve her practise. “I showed up
with nothing, not even a pen holder,”
she says. “I felt like I could move for-
ward more quickly by not holding
on to the past. I was unafraid, and I
wasn’t trying to nervously prove my-
self.”
Nevertheless, it took a while for
her humour to start appearing in
her work. “Art school in Iceland
was very serious,” she says. “I was
self-conscious about wearing mas-
cara or dressing expressively. You
felt like you couldn’t be taken se-
riously if you were a
c h i c k .
affect the way you feel—not just visu-
ally, but your relationship to size, and
the scale of the world. You can feel like
you’re a tiny organism in somebody’s
fur. I’m changing people into lice! And
just showering them in colour.”
EXPERIMENTAL AND
RADICAL
Hrafnhildur was born and raised
in Reykjavík, between the two
families of her biological parents.
“Maybe that was helpful,” she says.
“Being two daughters in two plac-
es, you develop an ability to just be
planted in any situation and make
it work.”
She first started creating things
as a form of of entertaining her-
self. “I started making art to fight
boredom, quite honestly,” she says.
“My mum was very supportive of
me being in my room and amus-
ing myself by making something.
It was a super happy childhood.”
Her creative endeavours were
boosted when she moved neigh-
bourhoods and enrolled in Foss-
vogsskóli. “I moved from a very
serious, disciplined, traditional
school—where the teacher had a
baton and was always shouting
‘Silence!’—to Fossvogsskóli,” she
recalls. “It was more experimen-
tal and radical, with mixed age
groups, and hexagonal tables in-
stead of desks. We had a lot of tex-
tiles and learning to sew and knit.
I met a group of girlfriends there,
and we’re still best friends.”
When the students finished their
lessons for the day, they were al-
lowed to pick what they did with
their remaining time. “I always
picked art, sewing and wood-
work—which is art, textiles and
sculpture,” smiles Shoppy. “It’s ev-
erything I do today. I was eight or
nine years old, and I already knew
where I felt happiest.”
BOY GEORGE DREADS
Hrafnhildur hit her teenage years
during the pre-boom Reykjavík of
the 80s. It was a very different cul-
tural landscape from the cosmo-
politan city of today. International
pop culture seeped slowly into
Icelandic society, creating new
interests and fads for the city’s
teenagers.
“I always had sculptural 80s hair,
and asymmetric perms, but I never
got to have Boy George dreads,”
Shoppy laughs. “I was
a break-
it’s light like cotton candy, and al-
most pukey sweet—then it evolves
into this colder green, and then a
hot, fiery area. The decision-mak-
ing is like sketching. It becomes
like painting in thin air. It’s my
hairy Pollock!”
Working with chaos—both apply-
ing order to it, and simultaneously
surrendering to chance happen-
ings and spontaneous ideas—is
a key part of Shoplifter’s process.
“You can’t really tame this mate-
rial,” she explains. “You don’t know
exactly what it’s gonna do. It’s a
beast—it does its thing, and you
have to work with that.”
The resulting installation exists
as a kind of dreamspace—a hidden
pocket of the world where reality
seems to merge with the surreal,
colourful visions of Shoppy’s vivid
imagination.
“It’s an environment,” she says.
“There are nooks and crannies you
can nest in, but then sometimes it
seems like it’s disappearing into
the distance. It’s like an excursion
into a tropical forest—almost like
a path, with intersections. It seems
random, but it’s very specific—and
then again, unplanned. That’s the
exciting thing—the moment when
it’s coming into being, and we’re
blending the colours, and explor-
ing what’s possible in the space.
And being comfortable with not
knowing the outcome.”
NATURAL ECSTASY
Hrafnhildur has long been fasci-
nated by everyday human rituals
of grooming, cleaning, extending,
removing, and arranging hair. “We
have such an extraordinary connec-
tion to this fibre,” she says, looking
up into the dayglo mass above our
heads. “It quickly stopped mattering
to me whether the material I’m us-
ing is synthetic or human. Synthetic
hair is so wonderfully absurd—it’s
mass-produced solely for people to
attach it to their heads. I like to take
that material and give it another life,
as art.”
The result is both organic and syn-
thetic in appearance—a woman-
made synthesis of the natural world.
The vivid colours create a physical
response in the viewer, whether from
the itchy grasp of the hanging fibres
tickling them from above, or a shiver
from the body’s response to the co-
lourful sensory overload.
“It’s definitely colour therapy,” says
Shoppy. “I have this theory that colour
penetrates your retina, goes into your
brain, and turns on the natural ec-
stasy in your brain. It has the power to
“I studied piano and
violin, but I realised I
was never going to be
an exceptional soloist,
and said ‘fuck that.’
I gave up violin for
breakdancing.”