Kristin GUDJONSDOTTIR
My nationality is Icelandic. I grew up in the capital, Reykjavik, but my parents came from one of the most isolated part of Iceland. Their ancestors had been farmers and fishermen as far back as documentation exists. When I was young, we would spend one month each summer on the farm where my mother grew up, which was still run in an old fashioned manner. When I was twelve, we built a summer house in a nearby valley. At one point, eighty people lived in that valley, most of them fishermen. Today no one lives there. Many years later, during my art studies in California, I started to incorporate my memories from this valley and the farm into my art work. I began to make works based on tools that these people used in their daily life. I used to find parts and pieces of these tools as I was digging in the coarse ground for soil for my mothers tree planting effort. As a kid I kept these parts in containers, or hung them up on the wall in my room and wondered what they could have been used for. These tools were my main physical link to the past. To better explore my origins, I began to alter the way I made my sculptures. I started to think about how I got the material. If the piece broke while I was creating it, I stopped and figured out how my ancestors would solve a similar problem. Remembering repairs that I had seen on old tools, I would apply the same philosophy to my pieces. My sculptures became more based on old tools, used in farming and fishing. But their functionality would not be evident, just as the tools that I found in the past were a mystery to me. Keeping with this philosophy, the material in the pieces had to either be found, or be destined for the trash bin. I would visit recycling centers, and local companies or artists to get raw materials. I would get window glass from recycling centers, colorful cut offs from glass art studios, clay trimmings from local artists, ceramic glazes from garage sales, and so forth. Today, my work is completely made out of reused materials. My point is not to make a statement about how much modern society throws away. The point is that the raw material can be reused, using it for a certain function does not stop it from being re-molded and recast as something else. I make all my work myself and use for example my own techniques for creating reuseable molds to cast glass to be as true to my motto of reusing materials.
