The Wildflower / Villiblómið – Hafnarborg, Iceland

Autumn Exhibition 2020

Curated by Becky Forsythe and Penelope Smart

Exhibited artworks: Tools of Being, Portuguese marble, 2019. All works cut and shaped from raw stones, upcycled from waste material in quarries surrounding Évora, Portugal.

The Wildflower focuses a futuristic lens on that which is deeply familiar – our delicate flora clinging to rock – as it takes root in new stories. Through this lens, audiences re-engage a swell of complex emotions and an acute awareness of our fragile world and our place in it. Artists from Iceland and Canada cultivate new space for a dynamic collision of climate activism, interspecies ecologies, feminism and craft-based practice in contemporary art. Urging forward a renewed interest in traditional materials connected to local culture, artists transform wood, marble, plant dye, flowers, metal into new visions of textile, sculpture, painting and stained glass armour.

The conceptual vision for the exhibition is that of an open “field” in a northern landscape. The gallery blooms as an active space for new imaginings in powerful union with intimate qualities of nature – innocence, colonization, gentleness, force – that are being written, heralded, in our own time. Our human relationship to nature is in flux, unfathomable and fantastical, felt as both a gendered and androgynous transformative power — a source of productive tension and enchantment.

Participating artists: Arna Óttarsdóttir, Asinnajaq, Eggert Pétursson, Emily Critch, Jón Gunnar Árnason, Justine McGrath, Katrina Jane, Leisure, Nína Óskarsdóttir, Rúna Þorkelsdóttir and Thomas Pausz. Exhibition photography by Vigfús Birgisson.