Cold Man’s Trophies | Pure Maid’s Garlands: Gudny Gudmundsdóttir

In fluid dynamics, a vortex is a region in liquid in which the flow revolves around an axis line; it may be straight or curved.  The concept of circulation exceeds our sensation of time as if stuck, placed, compartmentalised in vertical vacuum without linear time. Our perception of an endless cycle becomes horizontal, viewing the same moment from infinite perspectives. With every perspective experienced – getting closer to the core. Revolving on the fluidity of existence, mapping it, re-mapping it, breaking it down to its smallest common denominator, picking up the pieces, and putting them back together. The same pieces but a different perspective - endless cycles around the same axis line. Is there time? 

Ophelia floats in the water, she is slowly beginning to sink. Her heavy robes pull her into the vortex of capsuled time surrounded by flowering greens and garlands around her neck. Why did she die? At this point, she is already estranged from reality, driven to insanity by impossible situations. Or is it that the world that she lives in has become insane, and her sanity a surreal oasis exploited by her fellow men?

The shifting of perspectives is a cornerstone in Guðný Guðmundsdóttir´s body of work. She dismantles her subjects, leisurely peeling the layers off, researching and understanding bit by bit and then assembling the pieces together again, creating in utter precision new objects, landscapes, maps, details. The image of Ophelia comes to her, counter clockwise, like from another end of a vortex where she had been capsuled. The flow of the two revolves around the same axis for a while before Ophelia gets pulled in again. During their cycle together Guðný is given the opportunity of a reenactment of Ophelia's death. She maps it, breaks it down to its smallest particle as well as scaling it up to its largest, finding the contradicting discrepancy, attracting opposites, juxtaposing the powers of man/maschine and nature. 

Cold Man’s Trophies | Pure Maid’s Garlands is a game of poetic language, a homage to reflection of perspectives and to the manifestation of the harsh powers of nature. The image of Ophelia (John Everet Millais) with her femininity, strength and vulnerability are in stark contradiction to the visual and literary memory of the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Casper David Friedrich), the übermensch, and romanticism in general. These opposites, feminine/masculine, are moving in opposite directions around the same axis line, encapsulated in time, in endless cycles.