PLANTS AS RECORDING DEVICES AN INTERVIEW WITH HILDUR BJARNADÓTTIR BY JULIE LÆNKHOLM I am calling Hildur at her home an hour south of Reykjavík where she lives with her family. I am sitting in my studio in Copenhagen’s Refshaleøen, surrounded by Icelandic wool. JL: Tell me about the piece of land you moved to with your family, and its relationship to your work?
HB: Since 2013 I have been working actively with a small piece of land in the South of Iceland, Þúfugarðar, which I moved to in 2016. For some years now, plants have been one of the main topics and materials in my work. Plants function as recording devices in the place they grow in; they contain the specific social and ecological context of the place. They take in information through their leaves, flowers, and roots. Everything that happens in that place becomes a part of the plant. These are common plants such as water avens, garden angelica, wild thyme, dwarf willow, crowberry, northern bedstraw, and reindeer moss. I extract colour from the plants and thus carry this information further into wool thread, silk fabric, and watercolours that I use in my work. I use the plants that grow at Þúfugarðar: the work
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speaks about this place, its inhabitants, human beings, animals, and plants. The work also speaks to its ecological condition in a more global sense: how human beings are influencing it both from nearby and far away. JL:
What does colour mean to you?
HB: Colour in my work is a material— the appearance of the colour itself is less important than the information it carries within it. When I use plants to produce colour I never reject a shade, I always use the one it procures because it contains the place, and in that sense, all colours are equally important, even if they are very faint or yet another hue of yellow. I see the acrylic paint as an additional material that brings painting into the equation. In some sense the acrylic paint grounds the work—using only plant colour seems idyllic and sublime, but using both acrylic paint and plant colour facilitates a dialogue between the two elements and creates a platform for them to co-exist.
