Þórdís Alda Sigurðardóttir stages a laundry room, a kind of mega-laundry. The drum in the machine turns like the earth itself. The water pours out of it in wide streams, it foams, the machine empties itself and spins the laundry. It piles up, becomes a mountain and from its core a chant on the earth’s beauty sounds. Megawatts power the continual recreation of reality. The animal horns mounted on the cupboards in the laundry room give it an animalistic appearance as if the washing machine were a bull wallowing in mud. And the work evokes further trains of thought. One of the best-known definitions of art stems from Aristotle, but according to it, art’s role is to be a catharsis, a cleansing of one’s emotions. Art stages emotionally charged events, which the spectator experiences and thus is purged of her own emotions. One suspects that Þórdís plays with this mega-definition of art and takes it in unexpected directions with her mega-washing process. It’s possibly an encouragement for a clean up of the art scene by digging up and washing clothing that has disappeared in the laundry basket. 

Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir

WHITER THAN WHITE 

Þórdís Alda Sigurðardóttir (b. 1950 in Reykjavík) has lived for most of her life in the Icelandic countryside, apart from a brief period in Denmark and Germany. She grew up in Fljótshlíð, south Iceland, and now lives at Dalland in Mosfellsbær in the southwest, where she pursues her art along with horse-breeding, forestry, and revegetation of barren land. Þórdís has visited, among other countries, India, Mexico, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic and Canada; and her experience of those countries has probably influenced her art to some degree, although she seeks themes and subjects in her immediate environment. She is less drawn to use material from a cultural context with which she is not familiar, probably due to her respect for the future, progress and diversity of the human spirit under many and various conditions. 

That which catches her attention on her travels must have plenty of time to be to be properly digested, if it is to emerge later in her work. She seeks the interplay of opposites, and often expresses herself through something familiar from nearby, placed in an unexpected context. 

When Þórdís dons the robes of a Nepalese monk, she looks quite as natural as in her jodhpurs and woollen sweater. Because she adapts the exotic to herself, and herself to the exotic, it means a lot to her if the observer can find him/herself in her works, and experience something through them, drawn from his/her own life or memories. 

After qualifying as a teacher from the Iceland Teacher Training College (now Iceland University of Education),  Þórdís Alda studied art at the Reykjavík School of Art, then at the Iceland College of Arts and Crafts (1980-84, sculpture department), and finally at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She has held nine one-woman shows and participated in many group exhibitions, indoors and out, in Iceland and abroad. Þórdís Alda has been involved in running two galleries in Reykjavík, both operated by artists: Gallery Gangskör, and STARTART on Laugavegur in downtown Reykjavík. She is a member of  SÍM (the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists) and the Reykjavík Sculptors’ Association, and has performed various offices in the arts arena, such as serving on juries, organising exhibitions etc. In recent years Þórdís has been working with the Provincialists, a group of Nordic artists, curators and scholars who have held seminars and exhibitions in Iceland, Norway and the Faroe Islands. 

Þórdís Alda explores many worlds (though staying at home) in her work. Some of her work bears the mark of the agrarian society, which provides her with constant sources of inspiration. She strides across grassfields and abandoned farmsteads, picking up tools, utensils and relics of olden times. She takes these objects, and nourishes and enfolds them by coating them in fat and wool, sometimes bound by rusty wires. She also gathers up odds and ends accumulated by her contemporaries, as seen in Yfirfall/Overflow (2004). She is constantly salvaging objects which have become obsolete and useless due to neglect and indifference – perhaps in order to express thanks for the resourcefulness of our ancestors, and to consider the material reality of today. In her quest for hidden treasure Þórdís picks up grime: she is blackened around the nose, her hair grows grey with dust and ash, and her hands are dirtied by handling the objects. The sense of the old is a comfortable feeling – not nostalgia but contentment. It is good to have survived, and found one’s way out of the grit and dirt.

The same resourcefulness and energy that enabled people to survive in primitive conditions is applied to the struggles of the present day. Today it is not need that motivates us. It is something else, but no less effective. We are driven onwards, like slaves under the whip. What has changed is that it is something in ourselves that wields the whip. We never feel that we do enough, or well enough. We are plagued by conscience, convinced that we should do more, and better. We feel that we must pass through the purifying flames of purgatory to prove ourselves, to show that we are doing our bit. Work becomes our salvation and redemption; it becomes the purgatory through which we must pass in order to be saved.

Fire gives warmth and energy, and at the same time it destroys. In the dark vision of the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus the world was an ever-living fire. We are our own fire: we set ourselves alight and burn up. Build up, tear down. Nourish, and destroy. A latter-day philosopher, Walter Benjamin, likened human history to a story of constant destruction; all development entails the obliteration of something else. Thus the history of progress is also a history of destruction.  

Some people hug trees in order to save forests, while others use heavy machinery to tear down those forests. Humans need timber for shelter and fuel, yet without forests they will suffocate. Are there two different souls in the same heart? Even when we believe we are building something up, cleansing something, we sometimes go too far. Þórdís considers this idea in her work about a gigantic washing machine churning out laundry, building up a mountain of clean linen. The drum spins without stopping, in an eternal unchanging rotation. The laundry mountain reaches up to the sky, in a pyramidal form reminiscent of a pharaoh’s grave, with an ambiance of death and the mystical. A mysterious message is chanted from the depths of the laundry pile:  Fífilbrekka gróin grund/ Dandelions on slopes of green - a quotation from Iceland’s best-loved romantic poet, Jónas Hallgrímsson. If we transpose the verse into the imagery of the present day we see virulent green fields, rigid bright-yellow flowers and a bluer-than-blue sky: a background for clean white washing fluttering on a line, as in an ARIEL ad on television. The chanting from the depths, half-stifled by the weight of the laundry, is also the dark undertone of the superficial surface gloss. 

Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir