The Living Art Museum/Nýlistasafnið, Reykjavík, Iceland
Works by Eygló Harðardóttir gather together in Another Space, like crystals in constant growth, like reactive moments to accumulated material in process with the artist. Some works assist in displacing the space they occupy by implying an alternate to it. Others ground it, fasten it and make us aware of it. They often weightlessly balance upon colour, content and a trust in found unaltered components. They assemble with a sense of impermanence and build new space.
For Eygló, works are an intuitive approach to the material with no planned or perceived endpoint in sight, rather a means to marking moments on surfaces. She explores edges, structure, potential and discards, and employs the opportunity to shift these things. It is often more than not that the remains of a long conversation with the material becomes the work we view in the end. In that process, and here in the exhibition, we see it stretched out, suspended, adjusted and re-arranged.
One of the focal points in Another Space, is an assembly of drawings created while the artist was under hypnosis. Drawn in a state of parallel consciousness, with enhanced focus and concentration, the images are attached to different regions of the body including the neck, heart, stomach, brain, tailbone and face. With this knowledge the immediacy of the experience translates into a question of another space. They have become layered prints and stand in as a thread running through the exhibition, the above question always present in the background.
Eygló’s attention is drawn to the energy between things. In that draw there is uncertainty, but there is also most certainly possibility. Her work can be characterized by materiality and process. Like momentary collisions, portable and temporary occasions that bring with them a sense of groundlessness. A feeling of floating between here and there with linear time replaced by a cyclical or growing logic.
Text by Becky Forsythe