Bloodline
Ólafsdalur, Gilsfjörður |
2016-07-23 - 2016-08-14
Bloodline – Guðrún Tryggvadóttirs' Exhibition in Ólafsdalur by Gilsfjörður.
July 23 to August 14 2016.
During the past months and years I have been working on pieces inspired by the fourth dimension, time as it appears to me, statistics and facts in the renewal of generations and the patterns it produces.
I had the urge to look for ways to see time in a new way, connect time to my own life and so to the life of all humans. At the same time I am investigating what connects one generation to the next, the genome thinning and memories and life experiences passed on to us and that we inherit from our ancestors and possible affect it has on us today.
This work has led me to a seemingly unendless path of possiblities because the scope, in both psycholocial and material sense is obviously way above our comprehensive capabilities.
At the same time, I have been dealing with and sorting out memories I have of my ancestors and looking at the role they played in their lifetime. This rendes vous with my ancestors, especially my foremothers, constantly produces new ideas, images, symbols, colors and patterns that I find both inspiring and enriching to work with within the limits and with the possibilites of my art.
The show ‘Bloodline’ in Ólafsdalur has my studies of my bloodline of eleven direct female descent that lived in Dalir county, and the ones that moved away, to the South of Iceland, as motive. I have no conscious memory from Dalir county as my great-grandmother moved from there as a child, and so it has been an adventure to go to Dalir, visit my foremothers farmlands, let it inspire me and work with that experience, painting their portraits, near their roots, in Ólafsdalur in Dalir county.
The projects main objective was to make a connection with them, compare us and unite. Find some thread that I yearned for and I find interesting on my path of self discovery and of the nature of human life. My finding is that we are actually experiencing the same thing, generation after generation. Curiousity and joy, love and sorrow and a constant battle bearing and bringing our children to this world, looking for a sense in our short lifespan and trying to survive in the harsh conditions of our homeland. Our body is a temporary organic condition, that comes and goes and converts into a new generation that goes on to have pretty much the same experience, time and time again. The role anybody plays today is practically the same anybody will play in the future.
Life is a present that we have to give away to the next generation which is a big fortune and a reason to celebrate. Death is but a neccesary part of the workings of the clockwork of time and nothing sad about that.
The result of this journey through time could be viewed in six rooms on the second floor of the old agricultural school in Ólafsdalur where I had my ancestors plus me and my daughter, confront each other and so make a quiet family reunion possible in spite us otherwise being seperated by different time zones. There conversations took place, on life itself, its purpose, spirit and matter and the joy of having been allowed to take part in life and beget children for the future.
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