Þórdís Alda and the Story of Small Things

by Jón Proppé

A whole forest of trees made of rusted iron with rusty, root-like twists of iron on the floor. The leafy coiffure of the trees – if one may call it that – is made up out of

newspapers, Icelandic woolen sweaters, and socks. All of the elements are familiar, but the context is astonishing; and up out of the forest stands a flaming tower, as if to show us the way. Þórdís Alda has long made use of materials of this kind – clothing, old flatirons, socks, rusty bits of iron – in her sculptures and installations. These are most often things that we use and encounter daily without paying much attention to anything but their use. We wear socks, for example, wash them, put them away in our drawers, again and again, each week of our lives, with hardly any thought; socks are so insignificant that when a hole is worn in them we hardly hesitate when we throw them away.

“I work out of the little things that surround us”, Þórdís Alda explained in a 2004 interview. Her materials are the everyday things whose significance derives from the fact that we work with them constantly without thinking much about them, and they become integral to our daily lives without our even noticing. In the rusty forest, as in many of her earlier works, Þórdís Alda collects together commonplace elements in such a way that all at once a wonderland is formed, and out of this contradiction

flourishes, all of a sudden, a welter of complex metaphors and unexpected new perspectives.

Þórdís Alda Sigurðardóttir studied art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at the Munich Acadamy of Art( Akademie der Bildenden Künste in München) in the

1980’s and held her first individual exhibition in 1987. That was a period of rapid development in Icelandic sculpture, not least on account of the experiments being

done by Icelandic women artists in which they used, among other things, textiles in combination with various other elements – both natural materials and man-made

objects from our everyday surroundings – preferably connected with the work and environment of women. This approach seems to have suited Þórdís Alda very well,

and in her works she explores the possibilities of her materials, the significance that derives from everyday familiarity, and the metaphors that appear when these objects are placed in a new context or given new roles.

The meaning of her works is both personal and astonishingly universal, for out of her materials, Þórdís Alda can create infinitely many stories and deal with the most

unexpected subjects, whether personal or political. It is often the most mundane objects that have, finally, the most to say about our lives and our history. Here the

artist herself may appear in pictures that are arrayed together with images of endangered animals. This combination is incredibly forceful and challenging: the dangers are no longer distant or abstract but personal and present.

Challenge of a similar kind is also seen in a juxtaposition of a video of a child with an installation and also in the work Leaders Summit. The political and our common

human story are always actually personal, and we do not really understand anything that we cannot interpret as a part of our own story. This conversation with history is a basic thread that runs through the art works of Þórdís Alda and appears most clearly in “the small things that surround us”. She grew up in the countryside, preoccupied with the tasks of daily life: indoor and outdoor work and the life that is woven out of work of this kind. She highlights the work of washing, the tools and instruments of our daily routine, and transient, disposable objects – the things that collect up around us, such as the heap of metallic junk behind the shed or the hodge-podge of little things in the drawer whose origins we have long ago forgotten.

Sculpture installation is very well suited to her vision and approach. In an installation, an environment is created into which we can enter or at least measure ourselves

against, an environment that resembles the materials that she uses: at once commonplace and startling. Here mundane things are placed in a new context, and out

of this emerges a dialogue that we immediately become a part of, precisely because the everyday environment is our own and, in large part, shared among us: All of us

have socks in our drawers or hanging on the washline. What is unexpected is that, out of such things, it is possible to construct an entire, fabulous world – even a fantasy forest – thus to reveal a much greater story about our own world and our destiny.

Translated by: Barbara Belle Nelson