Iceland review - 2002, Page 31

During a recent visit to her studio in New York City, a
curator came up with this analogy for Katrín
Sigurdardóttir’s projects: “Sometimes in your dreams,
you are in a place that you know to be familiar, but there
is nothing familiar about it. You know that you’re in
your room, but it isn’t actually your room at all.”
“It’s this relationship exactly,” Katrín offers as a win-
dow into interpreting her art, some of which is “generi-
cally based” on Icelandic geology. For instance, if her
three-dimensional work depicts a mountain, Katrín
explains that she can “point you in the direction of
where to find the mountain. If you went there, you
would know you were in the right region, but you would
not be able to find that mountain.”
Place, memory and imagination are constant inter-
secting themes in Katrín’s pieces, which she refers to as
“scenography”. Dividing her time equally between
Iceland and New York City, these scenes illustrate the
exterior and interior environments that are constantly
changing in her own life. “At the bottom of my work,”
she says, “is the notion of home and displacement.”
Though her early work focused on painting and exper-
imental film, venturing into sculpture, installation, and
sound, Katrín’s painting has become increasingly “instal-
lational” and sculptural. Today, she focuses on “installa-
tion-sculpture and architectural interventions”, or pieces
that intervene with the architecture of an exhibition
space without permanently changing it.
Until this past year, Katrín’s own work has revolved
around urban and suburban landscapes. It was not until
she exhibited a piece entitled ‘High Plane’, a wood and
polystyrene platform built approximately ten feet off
the ground, that she dealt with “pure, straight nature”.
In this three-dimensional rendition of 29 islands and
mountains, observers can literally stick their heads
through the work in one of two square holes cut into the
relief.
Creating interactive scenes for her audience is always
a vital product of Katrín’s projects. The scenes naturally
“invite people to make their own fiction; their own story
within each scene”, she says. “People have come to me
during shows and said, ‘Where are the little people?
Where are the cars?’ People make their own narrative,
which is essentially what we do as children when we play
with toys. I’m happy to be able to key into that because
it’s very precious. Most people like to be able to return
to that state.”
Though it is not an articulated intention of hers,
Katrín acknowledges that she may go through a similar
process in creating these scenes from her life. “My work
is about memory and fiction and the relationship
between the two. Fiction is always based on something
you’ve lived.”
Which is why, perhaps, Katrín thrives in the cross-cul-
tural world she occupies in Iceland and the internation-
ally saturated environment of New York. “Culture is
what you live – it’s not only what you remember. It’s not
only what you’re born into. It’s also how you live your
life today.”
“At the bottom of my work,”
she says, “is the notion of
home and displacement.”
Katrín Sigurdardóttir
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