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Near and Far: On Katrin Sigurdardottir's Sculptures
Gregory Volk

When I wrote this, I did not yet know the work of Katrin Sigurdardottir, which I would encounter a short while later in New York.   When I did discover her work, I immediately recognized what had originally fascinated me in Iceland: a savvy and idiosyncratic artist whose work was uncommonly energized by her complex relationship to her homeland, including its spectacular landscape and geology, but also her own rhythms of departure and return, memory, fantasy, and at times alienation and conflict.   At the time, Sigurdardottir was making a series of sculptures-as-furniture out of cut foam.   The resulting structures were like miniature renditions of vast, and presumably Icelandic, topographical landscapes seen from on high ¾ from an airplane, for instance, or better yet from a satellite. These fabricated versions of "nature" had some of the splendor and wonderment of the real thing, but also conjured model-making kits, museum dioramas, and movie props. When nature appears in Sigurdardottir's work, it is always in a highly mediated, "impure" way, subjected to all sorts of cultural and personal transformation and manipulation.

Still, one had the desire to lie down on these peculiar mini-worlds, to close one eyes and dream on them, and to be mentally transported; fused with elements of architecture and design, Sigurdardottir's nature simulacra oftentimes have such a transportive, even mind-bending, power.   For her work High Plane (2002), Sigurdardottir constructed a high wooden plane as a platform atop upright wooden planks.   Two stairways let viewers climb up and poke their heads through square openings to see another of Sigurdardottir's splendid, artificial vistas, in this case 29 miniature mountains (based on Icelandic mountains) all made out of blue insulation material.   One had the feeling one was looking for miles and miles at a breathtaking landscape, and not up close at small piles of synthetic stuff from the hardware store.   In an unusual twist, when two viewers gazed simultaneously through opposite openings they also eyed one another across a seemingly vast expanse.   Sigurdardottir's fabricated landscape thus doubled as a potentially cathartic interpersonal encounter.   Elsewhere, Sigurdardottir has installed miniaturized synthetic landscapes made out of polystyrene and model-making materials in shipping crates and suitcase compartments.   When the box or the suitcase is opened, one discovers landscapes which are sometimes based on actual places, but also fictional, and often a combination of both; moreover these hybrid landscapes have a way of seeming at once plausible and altogether otherworldly. Throughout her work, Sigurdardottir typically scrambles the distinctions between near and far, architecture and nature, immediate experience and layers of memory, while concentrating attention on (and thoroughly manipulating) exactly how we perceive.

When it comes to her combination of architecture, design, and landscape, Sigurdardottir points to her years in New York as an abiding influence, more the city itself than the kind of art being produced there. In New York it oftentimes seems that the whole city is in a state of permanent physical flux, with buildings going up and coming down, and with whole neighborhoods constantly morphing into new conditions and new identities.    If you leave even for a few months it is guaranteed that some familiar things will look decidedly unfamiliar when you return, that new buildings will be looming where you never expected them, and that old buildings will be gutted or in the process of renovation. The actual experience of being an artist in New York also oftentimes involves scrambling for studio space and both putting up and tearing down walls over and over.   Other factors enter into to Sigurdardottir's work, notably her study of deconstructivist architecture, and her personal experience of making a home in a fractious, foreign city.   Sigurdardottir's frequent use of architectural fragments, and the way that her works evoke disruption, dislocation, relocation, and constant reinvention, suggest repetitive efforts to domesticate a city that is at once close and remote, familiar and enduringly alien.

Recent works by Sigurdardottir both use and transform some of the most basic architectural components such as walls, shelves, rooms, storage compartments, and floor plans.   In Sigurdardottir's case, however, her architecturally inflected works, which seem to beholden to interiors, are suffused with wild news of the outside, and the outside, in her case, usually (but not exclusively) means Iceland, with its glaciers, coursing rivers, rugged mountains, rocky outcroppings, and jagged lava fields--in short this "homeland on the mind" that enters her work in startling and compelling ways.

One of Sigurdardottir's twisting, low-to-the-ground sculptures made from architectural scale lumber and wire mesh conflates the floor plan of the hallway in her New York apartment building with a section of the glacial river Jökulsá á Fjöllum in Iceland; other works in this series refer to the outlines of Icelandic islands. These sculptures, incidentally, are wonderful. Decidedly fragile and non-monumental sculptures, which are made of nothing more than tiny walls and even tinier lights, and which are distinctly playful, deftly allude to the kind of world-shaping geologic forces prevalent in Iceland. For another recent work, Sigurdardottir constructed what she calls a "false" wall in a gallery in New York, which easily looked as if it had been there forever except for its base, which was transformed into a miniature, yet exact, backlit replica of the façade of the artist's elementary school in Reykjavik.   The effect was magical.   Iceland and New York, childhood and adulthood, grade school and art gallery all fused together, and this is one of numerous times when Sigurdardottir's architectural transformations seem frankly poetic and deeply touching.

It is interesting that Sigurdardottir has increasingly gravitated to working with walls, which are, of course, consummate barriers; they are what separates us from the outside, and also from one another.   In Sigurdardottir's art, however, it is this barrier aspect of walls that gets completely subverted.   You see over them, as if you were a giant, around them, at them, and sometimes through them, and they also misbehave: they are not rectilinear but instead curvaceous, organic, at times choppy and ragged, and always surprising. Rather than closing off or defining space, they open space up to a host of new connotations, associations, and psychological possibilities, and that's precisely what happens with Sigurdardottir's striking new project for the Reykjavik Art Museum.

Here, two upright, near-identical structures (both a cross between sculpture and architecture) mirror one another in the space.   Like many of Sigurdardottir's works, these structures are meticulously arranged, but also rough and seemingly casual, and while you recognize them as quirky architectural structures you also get a feeling of rocky escarpments, mountainous peaks, glacial debris, and ice floes, as if nature were mysteriously infiltrating piles of raw construction materials.   A tiny, curving wall connects the two structures.   While it is indeed delicate, it also looms large in the work, suggesting distant horizon lines and a meandering path through the mountains, but also, more implicitly, fragile tries for connection between people, disparate places, and present and past.   The whole installation involves constant shifts of scale, ranging from quite big to really small, which are masterful, as is the exchange that happens between interiors and exteriors.   You can walk around the work, appreciate it from a distance, and also quite literally walk into it, where it becomes an intimate enclosure.   Moreover, this static work implies motion within the space, but also between states of being, ranging from one's public identity to intimacy with others and solitude.    Combining raw architectural materials with raw aspects of nature, Sigurdardottir has devised a work that bridges architecture, landscape, and complex psychological nuances.