Artist Björk Guðnadóttir (b.1969) considers her art practice as visual thinking and reaction to her surroundings. “The process of making art is a search, a way of finding and identifying the familiar in my surroundings as well as in my emotional spheres. I try to reach into a void of memory, toward undefined or unconscious feeling – like when you can’t remember a name or a word but you know it’s there in your mind. It’s a way of embracing memories through the use of material, yet not in order to define or understand them but rather to amplify the familiar through deconstruction. By taking things apart and catching what falls in between.”

What conducts the search is the aim for getting closer to an experience, being guided by perception and giving it a sense of form.

Björk uses various media, materials and approaches when making her art. Installations often evolve around sculptures that in one way or another connect with crafts such as sewing, knitting and crocheting – domestic chores she grew up with and learned from her grandmothers. Drawing, photography and printing also characterise her work.

In Helsinki Björk has been going to flea markets and charity shops collecting home-made and used things that seem to have a sense of history or a hint of memory in them. She then ‘infiltrates’ the objects by constructing a fragmented vision where the objects’ details become monuments for familiarity. Together with the found objects the work “Infiltration” at the HIAP project room consists of sculpture, drawings and photographs.

Björk Guðnadóttir lives in Reykjavík, she completed her M.A.(MFA) from The Umea College of Art in 1999 and has also studied tailoring at ESMOD, Paris.

Her residency in Helsinki is organised with the support of Kulturkontakt Nord.