Hildur Bjarnadóttir

In her work Hildur Bjarnadóttir investigates issues of belonging, ecology, place and cohabitation with animals and plants on a small piece of land in the south of Iceland where she lives and works. The plants on the piece of land function as recording devices which take in information from the ecological and social systems they belong to through the soil and the air. Bjarnadóttir makes this information visible by extracting color from the plants which she uses to dye wool thread and silk fabric to make woven paintings and large scale silk installations. Her work brings forward diverse information, experiences, viewpoints and elements of the land, they are autonomous subjective systems which shed light on an intricate net of cohabitation and belonging.

Hildur Bjarnadóttir lives and works in Reykjavík and Flóahreppur. She graduated from the textile department of The Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in 1992 and finished her MFA degree from the fine arts department in Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in 1997. In 2009, she completed a diploma in Arts Education from the Iceland Art Academy. Autumn 2013 she started working on her Ph.D. in fine arts at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design which she completed in February 2017. Hildur has held many solo exhibitions internationally and in Iceland including: 2017; Cohabitation at the Trondelag Senter for Samtidskunst, 2016; Ecosystem of Color at The Reykjavík Art Museum, Kjarvalsstaðir, Colors of Belonging in Bergen Kjøtt, Norway, 2015; Subjective Systems in Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo and Mapping a Piece of Land in Hverfisgallery, and 2014; Flora of Weeds in Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavík.