Margrét Blöndal seeks in her art to evoke a geolocy of the domestic, to see in the home strata of matter and subtle accumulations, attesting not eruptions or seismic movement, but the sheer everyday business of living ...
Concerning a geology of the domestic
An essay by Margrét Blöndal - excerpts
Stains The history that should be hidden
Attraction The quiet power of the mundane
Trace Hints of the unknown
Ooze Humble sign of existence
Environ Wild things and dry-wall boil, simmer, seethe and stew
Actuality The impossibility of faking
Void A loaf of bread and wonder -bread
Protection Refined sugar and bleached flour
Forces Presence and handling
The source for my work is everyday life. By taking material out of my closest surroundings, converting its familiar appearance and putting it into a different context, I try to create a place for contemplation for the viewer. I want my works to look incidental, as if they could have grown from the wall or the floor, fallen from the ceiling, occured in some corner ... not ‘placed’. I do not want the works to have a clear reference - rather look at them as something that each person could translate into her own experience depending on location and space. I would like the viewer to be confronted - versus the viewer looking at a display. No space is ‘ideal’ for the works. They could be installed in any environment, where the location would change their meaning by the context of the space.
The streams of details interest me, little things that quietly but thoroughly change their environment. I want to draw attention to the things that are around us but we have stopped noticing because their presence is mundane to us; the things that truly exist and affect their environment and space although they don’t scream out for attention, ‘the little’ which step by step gets into our consciousness where it eventually digs in, something that exists and does not exist - on the edge of being something and nothing.
I am interested in a hidden reality, i.e. what is actually going on behind our dry-walls and false sense of security. The security that we desperately try to create in our sterile homes of spic and span. The security of the artificial fire-places that can be turned off and on - communication without touching. The world of wonder-breads instead of loaves of bread. The inability to observe nature physically and experience it instead of viewing through the video-camera. The void between taking a walk in the mall and running around in the woods.
I look at the pieces as reminders. Reminders of what we have lost and abandoned. They are made out of sugar, - our treat and threat; transformed from refined whiteness into brown mass. The pieces are pure and their purity meltable, depending on the heat and humidity of the environment. They quietly occur and slowly disappear. Their existence is short but leaves a mark: stains with a story. They look for a comfort and are willing to fill up one’s psychological gap for a while.The process is important to me. It is my geology. A process that requires presence and handling; boiling, simmering, seething and stewing. Iceland and security. Family and protection.
The beauty of the ugliness, the charm of the repulsive attracts me. Something that is beyond ugliness, too ugly to be simply ugly, too extraordinary to walk by, the astonishing colours of rotten fruits, the strong will of self-destruction. The lusciousness of the fungi that grew in the shower at my summer hotel in Iceland. We knew that they were not supposed to be there and the smell was enough to let the health and safety department seal the room. Still they were glorious, green little dots, with various shapes and greenness, furry and disgustingly attractive. The crooked lines of nature which have the amazing ability to occur interestingly; the concrete side-walk that cracks and creates the perfect line.
Geology:
I am profoundly involved in the process of making my work. All the steps are important, every single leak. The presence and handling, holding and touching, everything: an inseparable part of the pieces. I do not distinguish between blowing up the balloons, filling them with water, making the moulds, heating the sugar, popping the balloons, watching the waterfall or the stream, kissing the tears, following the melting, stirring, pouring the sugar in the moulds, layer by layer, stratification, each including an individual story, waiting for them to cool down, breaking the moulds, holding the piece, scraping the leak, sweeping the leftovers, picking up the fragments. All of these activities bring images to me that gather in the piece.
The fact that the pieces do not have a long life reminds me of how meaningless the household tasks sometimes are. Washing the clothes only to know that they will get dirty again. Wiping the molding only to know that it will collect dust again. Preparing the gratin so carefully, knowing that it will be devoured. Putting the toys in the box, knowing that they will be scattered over the floor a minute later - endless work and caring without understanding or sympathy.
Eva Heisler
Eva Heisler writes that Margrét H. Blöndal has described her work as a geology of the domestic. Domestic energies circulate primarily among tasks of preparation and those of restoration. Preparations for a meal, a celebration, a child’s bedtime, are followed, too soon, by the scraping of plates, the tossing of deflated balloons, the smoothing of the impress left by a sleeping body. And yet the evidence of bodies - a spill of sugar in the kitchen drawer, gum under the table, stains on the mattress-remains, and exceeds the wiping, the stacking, the smoothing. It is the excess of the domestic which interest the artist and inspires her work.
A series of dark lava-like forms are made of refined sugar. The sugar was melted and poured into plaster molds. Striations of brown, visible along the side, are evidence of an accumulation of layers. The tops are smooth and glassy, but the bodies have been roughened by the chisel used to break off the molds. Knobs protrude from some of the forms, the result of leaks in the mold. The glossy darkness of the objects might remind on of ‘hrafntinna,’ a volcanic glass, but the rounded fullness of the forms also calls to mind the females breast.
Blöndal considers it of significance that the material used to make these objects is melted on the stove in the kitchen, a room she views as the center of family life. Like the family, with its accumulation of misunderstandings and irritations, the unwieldy and dark mass of these sugar forms mask a real (and edible) sweetness.
The use of plaster molds in the making of these sugar forms inspired a series of plaster works that play with the notion of the mold as both a cavity in which something is shaped and an object so shaped. Flat, amorphous forms are supported by multiple breast-like legs. The legs are uneven, and the forms appear precariously balanced on the floor. The breast-like are, in fact, cavities, and hold balloons. In the preparation of plaster molds, balloons inflated with water are often used as the frame upon which the plaster itself is shaped. Blöndal´s plaster objects, however, twist this logic of mold-making. The colourful balloon are visible through what appear to be imperfections in the plaster object-places where the ‘mold’ appeared to give way. These wobbly, whimsical objects remind one of a broken but much-loved toy, yet the very detail that bestows this mood of whimsy (and festivity) on the object-the balloons-is exposed through what is made to appear a flaw, a gift and accident.
Blöndal´s objects draw attention to their source in accident and mishap: found mattresses stained by the body’s undoing, its incontinence or tears, remain untouched, bedding tossed on a pile of rubble acknowledges the entanglement of dream life and domestic life. And, like the receptions of domestic energy with its doings that are continually being undone, Blöndal´s work harbor their own undoing: the plaster objects contain water-inflated balloons that will gradually lose their volume - the objects of sugar will lose form, and melt, in the heat.
