The Consonance of Time and Matter

Thóra Sigurðardóttir’s art is an investigation of time, space, and matter. Her works show us how space, our bodies, and mundane materials are bound up in time, its passage, and our life in this context. It is the manifestations and interplay of these factors that are lyrically rendered in this exhibition. The works interconnect within four exhibition spaces. One can, for example, clearly see the graphic works through the free-standing sculpture, yet they retain their character—as mutable substances interacting with the light and shadow of the space.  

In the theory of relativity derived by Einstein (1879-1955), space and time are entwined in a  single whole. This is precisely what emerges in Þóra’s work, in the “rhythmic tones” that appear on the canvas and in the prints. Time is manifest in the materials the artist uses: These works are “temporal”. They convey an origin that came about long before Þóra assembled these objects, e.g. the time when the linen in the canvas sprouted in Poland’s flax fields and then was heckled, spun, and woven. Thus the works build on ties to the environment and substances that both the passage of time and bodily contact have left their mark on. Viewers are invited into a space where matter, the body, and experience intertwine.

The Space of Bodies and Things

Sigurðardóttir’s  three-dimensional works connect space, the body, our movements, and the material world around us. These factors influence each other and forge new connections, not only in their present form but also under the influence of passing time. Thus the material is never fixed and immutable; it is shaped by interplay, the motion of wind, ocean waves, and bodily contact. This dynamism means that the three-dimensional works are not isolated phenomena but rather part of a larger network. Each object harbors a history, a process, a life that was lived, and gives viewers a chance to contemplate their own bodies and their memories of past acquaintance with textiles, fruits, stones, polished wood, the skin of others, metals, or something else entirely.

In her art, Sigurðardóttir  draws attention to the way we move in the world. She explores the patterns that we follow in time and space and our bodies’ connection to the things we spend our days with, whether the architecture that envelops us or the artefacts we use, manipulate, and shape. The intimacy between bodies and objects is key in Sigurðardóttir’s  work and to this purpose she often uses mundane materials such as textiles, utensils, castings, and molds.

Sigurðardóttir works with things that are closely connected to our bodies, a kind of extension of our interactions with the world, with food, tools, remnants, and substances that have been handled. She asks: Are there any clear divisions between our bodies, material objects, and the space we move in? What is the interplay like between us and the objects we come in contact with? Her work alludes not only to the body and its dynamism but also to time and the shaping it does: movement through space and memory where the concrete and immaterial blend as one.

Interplay and Movement

Sigurðardóttir’s  artistic expression comes into being in conversation with a minimalist aesthetic in which she, like artists Anne Truitt (1928-1994) and Agnes Martin (1912-2004), explores rhythmic patterns, the nature of substances and forms. At the same time, there is a clear difference between her work and that of well-known minimalists such as Donald Judd (1928-1994) and Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). They sought to cleanse their work of evidence of personal presence whereas Sigurðardóttir deliberately incorporates life as it is lived into her works; we perceive the hand that drew the lines on the surface of the canvas.

Her works thus preserve traces of those who shaped the objects; they are about the motions that affected their structure and the time that has played a part in altering their meaning. Given this, Sigurðardóttir’s sculptures are never abstract minimalist works but rather testimonies to an encounter of body and matter, of past and present.

Music is an artform that builds, like sculpture, on time and space as inseparable factors. Sigurðardóttir’s art contains clear allusions to the world of music. This applies to both the repetition and rhythm in her work and to the way the organic structure reveals connections between sound, rhythm, motions, and space. In Sigurðardóttir’s works we perceive this cadence, from rhythmic motions appearing on the canvas to the interplay between the objects and their reciprocal connections in the space.

In the darkened space of the museum we are drawn to a “being” dancing in water. It might be a substance taken from our own bodies. Indeed, it was taken from some-body. During our sojourn with this video work we have an opportunity to contemplate the body as matter, as animal, meat, a resource for us, and the subject of imagination and reflection. This is the aspect that Geir Svansson (1957-2022) pointed out in his discussion of several of Sigurðardóttir’s works (2003): They bring to mind the skin and membranes that delineate our contact with the world. There, emotions and experience settle in. Both we and the environment evolve as hands connect with matter, sound meets eardrums, light meets the eye, and the mouth tastes and chews.

The Austrian musicologists Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) and Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904) emphasized, with reference to the music of J.S. Bach among others, that the aesthetic core of music lies in its spatial composition, in tempo, rhythm, phrasing, and the physical characteristics of the sound. Here, too, the subject is space-time, in which music becomes a kind of abstract architecture—not sculpture in the material sense but a work that evolves in time, composed from acoustic structures one can bodily (materially) perceive and as an aesthetic experience, without reference to narrative or message.

Thus Þóra Sigurðardóttir’s works are an investigation of spatial experience in a broad sense, of the architecture, the space as an interplay of being and intervals, in which the body and its surroundings blend together and create a new intimacy.

Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud / English translation Sarah Brownsberger