Nature is porous, our relationship to it is porous. Constant movement, that is the nature of nature. Nature is us, we are nature, supra-conscious. Time as a cyclical system, Alpha and Omega, tree rings, gravity. The clock is turning, we try to turn it back. Back to nature, back to logic, back to the roots. Seven cycles, the great world rhythm. Life wants to be, life finds a way, Life force grows from the ground, it finds its way through the cracks. Resilience. We form it to our needs, life fades. Oxygen generated, oxygen suffocated. The highest virtues, the repetitive fall from grace. Karma-stuff. All of that. What comes around, goes around?

 

Artist Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir´s performative sculptures are patient teachers who show us how we are shaped by the reality we create for ourselves and bring our awareness to our relationship with nature. They ask us what it means to bring nature indoors and which elements in us are nurtured by wanting to be immersed in nature. The works share a silent roar, sounds of movement, similar to that which we can hear from the inside of our body, to the outside.

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The situations and objects that Tryggvadóttir creates want to perform. They are very present and feel like moving. They have a longing for kinesis. Scaling occurs as we move between the synthetic and the natural, objects of different sizes and ages, some made last month, others formed millions of years ago. The objects each have vibrations in as it seems altering states as part of an installation of becoming. Liquid runs dry, resulting in salt residue. 

 

We see objects in the exhibition space. We move between them. Our bodies gravitate towards the objects. We notice that they want to reach out to us; through their unique form, their movement, their sense of allure. We have entered a game of looking, observing, relating, and we are creating the rules of the game. Each object is a part of an organism, a sculpture lab in movement that will subtly change during the exhibition period. 

 

Compositions of synthetic and natural materials are being slowly rotated in cycles by motors, counterclockwise; tree logs, rubber, sea sponges, synthetic foam, rocks, salt. Saltwater is dripping onto the smaller objects as though our tears slowly solidifying the soft sponges. The sea keeps them open and breathing, but once the liquid dries up they are crystalized by the salt and become solid.

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The color palette is partially defined by choices of the mass production industry, but mostly by the artist´s desire to place organic materials together with synthetic ones, mild natural color-schemes against the bright everlasting man-made ones. A monitor shows a clip section of land being moved outdoors, a kinetic intervention the artist has made, once in summer and once in winter. The cut-out piece of grass slowly moves round and round and blends in with the ground around it. The earth is moving but is as well being played with. 

 

In the world of arresting objects, brought together and assembled by Tryggvadóttir from various realities, an inner logic is developed that has engaging qualities, maneuvering the elements. It is a kind of reversed alchemy in dialogue with ancient times when the most knowledgeable people on earth were at once a philosopher, healer, mathematician, physician, theologist and alchemist, and to whom the fundamental understanding of the crossovers of those knowledge-meridians were the very fertile ground to be explored.

 

Birta Gudjonsdottir,  Curator