Geirþrúður Einarsdóttir
Selasæng / Seal blanket

Seal blanket

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The exhibition Seal blanket is a journey in dream sleep, about memories and collective memory in dreams. Things and places can look different in memories than in the real world. Like in a dream, it is as if memory often does not obey the laws of everyday life. Locations are mobile, sizes are relative, and objects can change shape and even color. The works in the exhibition intertwine people's stories about life in the countryside with the artist's memories of the family's camping trips in his youth. Portraits are characterized by smell and feeling rather than clear reasoning. "Walking to the grass is what it was called, when you left home without a tent and were only a day away or sometimes only the night, if it was short to go to the grass."1 We drove into a deserted valley to an abandoned factory. We entered it and the house swallowed us. All kinds of old tools and equipment. The building blended into the landscape and birds flew in and out of the windows. We met an old man in full sea clothes. He lived in a small house in the flood plain and had a boat and a fishing net. We walked up to a glacier and I felt the air getting colder and I had to put on a hat and mittens. I remember a large turf with innumerable tufts. It was fun to jump between them. But then I got tired and we walked in silence. Suddenly a horse flew- popped up under my trouser leg. Next to the leg was a nest. I ran to my sister where she was standing on the top step of the fence ladder. We drove narrow mountain roads on steep slopes and my mother could not look out the window. Dad took sharp turns and I looked out the back window and saw two sandpipers with chicks running on the side of the road. Once I was going to stroke and took my pillow and started walking down the road. Dad came to me and convinced me to turn around. We camped by a stream that flowed into the sea. I fished for herring all day and came back to the tent where my mother was roasting loins. One night it rained so much that the tent leaked. We packed everything up and drove off.

 

1 From the Last Search (1944) by Ingibjörg Lárusdóttir

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Geirthrúður Einarsdóttir (b. 1989) graduated from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in the spring of 2016. In the fall after graduation, she was an intern at the artist-run space A-Dash in Athens. Today she lives and works in Reykjavík. Geirtrúður has recently been working on the creation of bas-reliefs from painted linen canvas. The works draw inspiration from landscapes and aerial photographs of unspeakable places. They are built in layers and lines and have a strong connection to nature. Geirthrúður is signed with Listval and has shown his works both at home and abroad.

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