Hildur Bjarnadóttir:
Cohabitation

The plants on this piece of land are used by Bjarnadóttir as recording devices to investigate the ecological and social systems they belong to. The plants collect information from the soil and the air, through their roots, petals, flowers and leaves.

The plants carry this information, which Bjarnadóttir makes visible by extracting color from them. Thus, the artist creates a dialogue between a natural and a man-made system of color, as she uses both dye from plants and acrylic paint in her artistic work. This can be seen in her woven paintings and large-scale silk works. Bjarnadóttir uses color as a material. It is more important to consider the origin of the colors than what they look like. There is also a sound installation that plays the sound from a common snipe when flying over the specific piece of land to mark its territory. Questions of ownership and cohabitation arise as the bird and Bjarnadóttir belong to the same place.

All art works in the exhibition are specific to the land in the south of Iceland. The works are systems which bring forward different information, feelings and elements of the land, they are autonomous and subjective. These systems shed light on an intricate net of cohabitation and belonging.