The Labyrinth Of Memories

Guðbjörg Lind Jónsdóttir´s perception of landscape is rooted in her upbringing in the West Fjords of Iceland; which is why we claim to recognize the waterfalls, valleys and islands that have been appearing in her paintings in recent years. However, Guðbjörg Lind has never attempted to show the objective landscape in a new light but rather to create visual worlds in the grey area between mind and nature, extensions of her own imaginative faculties. Her landscapes are thus private worlds in the fullest sense, sheltering her thoughts, feelings and even her silences.

Guðbjörg Lind´s new paintings of interiors are therefore not antithetical to her expansive landscape studies, but analogous to them, the private world reimagined as a „museum of memories“. A close look at these interiors also reveals striking formal affinities with her earlier landscapes. On the other hand these interiors have a particular cause – perhaps more than one – which is worth exploring. During the past few years Guðbjörg Lind and her family have been renovating an old house called Vertshús in the small village of Þingeyri in the West Fjords. During the renovation the artist has been assailed by great many memories and thoughts. At the same time each layer of wallpaper, old newspapers, timber and paint stripped from the walls, not to mention sundry trivial objects found under floorboards, have added to the history, as well as the „memory“ of the house.

During this process Guðbjörg Lind would have come to an understanding of what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called The Poetics of Space, i.e.how man constantly adapts his dwellings to his emotional and poetic needs, turning them into receptables for his memories. In her own poeticization of the spatial features of Vertshús Guðbjörg Lind has also sought inspiration in the works of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershöi, renowned for his intense evocations of human absence. But while Hammershöi deals with recent human absence, Guðbjörg Lind´s paintings are saturated with the presence of long-gone generations. Her interiors convey their memories,they carry like unheard sounds through open or closed doors, reverberate in back rooms, or they await us on the other side of windows opaque with hoarfrost or in dark and dusty corners. They give rise to emotions which Bachelard calls „an expression of a poetry that was lost“.

Aðalsteinn Ingólfsson, art historian