Three Norths: Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir

Three Norths, Icelandic artist Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir’s solo exhibition opening at Gallery Gudmundsdottir on April 29, 2022 is a meditative exploration of intersections between nature, materiality, temporality, and artistic process.Tryggvadóttir’s pieces range from experiments with organic pigments and magnetic rocks to playful interventions in natural environments. They are designed to prompt the perception that natural materials are not inherently rigid or static. In raising probing questions about the dynamism of materiality, Tryggvadóttir subverts conventional distinctions between artists and “inanimate” media. This insight reframes relationships between people and their material surroundings as inherently mutable.         

Tryggvadóttir’s two-dimensional pieces experiment with interactions between organic pigments and other natural materials. The pieces highlight the ways in which inanimate materials express a form of material agency as they interact and “perform” the drying process: pigment drying speeds vary based on their individual interactions with water, magnets, salt, and gravity.

I curate a setting for elements like gravity, pigment, and paper to interact. They are left to perform this event on their own for days. What remains is a mixture of colors that transform as they dry. Individual pigments isolate and take themselves out of the blend based on the chemical and physical properties of the pigment. The two-dimensional work is a documentation of this event. – Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir

Highlighting such performativity subtly subverts the idea that materials like paint are merely passive tools that artists use to venerate their own creative agency. 

There is a double positioning as director and observer of the material that enables us to redefine our relationship to it. – Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir

For Tryggvadóttir, the relationship between artist and materiality is far more complex—and aesthetically fruitful—than this narrative allows.

I don’t come up with ideas. They somehow happen in front of me. There’s something that resonates very strongly within me that I get exposed to in some way. My practice cultivates a base of ‘being in’ and ‘feeling in service to’ the material. I think about how I can be in service to this material that I’m working with or situation that I’m encountering, and what it should carry. I play with not holding all the authority or agency. – Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir

Tryggvadóttir’s dehierarchizing view of praxis is telling: she sees herself as collaborator with the materials she explores, facilitating contexts that bear witness to the material’s dynamic potential, something which she also invites the viewer to do in contemplating her work.

Tryggvadóttir’s video piece, capturing temporary and reversible interventions in nature (which she conducted on hikes in Iceland), further dislocates conventional dichotomies between artist and medium. Rather than bringing materials into the artistic space, the artist becomes the material that engages with—or marks—a natural space. In doing so, Tryggvadóttir crucially extends the viewer’s gaze beyond the gallery walls and offers a critical payoff: like the entanglement between artist and material, the relationship between a person and their natural environment is similarly open to question, not only within the gallery space (or under an aesthetic gaze) but in the world at large. 

A sculpture containing three magnetic rocks from different geological time periods probes this idea further by evoking a sense of temporality that extends vastly beyond the span of human existence. The rocks, which are approximately two million years old, six hundred thousand years old, and ninety-two thousand years old, contain iron particles that line up with the earth’s magnetic field at the time of their solidification. Compasses hanging above the rocks point to magnetic north, which shifts in direction based on the age of the rock. In observing this phenomenon in an aesthetic setting, the viewer is prompted to reflect on how they frame their own relationship to the world around them. 

Here, Tryggvadóttir shows that time-based perception undoes the idea that our bearings are inherently fixed: the ways in which we orient ourselves to our surroundings and the framings that we use to claim our “place” in the world can never be as static as we often assume they are. No picture of the world (or the conceptual mechanisms that we use to “pin it down”) is, thus, absolute. 

Tryggvadóttir’s artistic practice ultimately serves the aim of undoing conceptual rigidness, leveraging an aesthetic that centers on curating space for natural, time-based material processes to unfold and be aesthetically witnessed, thereby provoking shifts in perspective about our relationships with the world we inhabit and how we frame our place within it. 

– Dr. Erum Naqvi