In interviews

@sigursosa

Sigurrós Eiðsdóttir (b.1991) is an Icelandic artist who graduated from the Goldsmiths University in London with a BA in Fine Arts in 2016. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including in London, Leipzig, Berlin, Adelaide,Copenhagen and Reykjavík. She has had solo exhibitions in London, Adelaide and in Copenhagen and is working on 2 upcoming solo exhibitions this year in Berlin and Reykjavik. Sigurrós mainly works with collages and photography although she does not limit herself to only those mediums. She is also interested in installation work and textile. Her style is minimalistic and her interest in graphic design reflects itself in her work. Sigurrós lives and works in Berlin

“I like simplicity, something clean and minimal – beautiful. I work a lot with vintage magazines, I have a collection of 70´s playboy magazines that I regularly look through and cut out things that I find attractive, I really like the old ads, they seems so straight forward and silly so I use the text from them and most recently I have been obsessed with hands which of course work on a high level of practicality but they are also very complex, they can offer intimacy and pleasure, communication and you can also read emotion in people by how they touch and move their hands and I find them beautiful and weird at the same time. My techniques are simply gluing material on paper but with my own photography I´ll often digitally rearrange the material. It´s the composition that often takes the most time, I´ll leave things for a few days and come back to them to see if I´m happy with them. I find that if I don´t give it time then I´ll be unhappy with it later on. It depends on the project but I try and go with my first instinct when I choose material, something that catches my eye right away, that way I feel like I am being more honest with myself and my work. “

What inspires you?

I think what inspires me changes all the time, I might go to an art exhibition and feel such strong emotions afterwards that I just have to make something or I might just be sitting somewhere and I´ll see something that really catches my eye and I´ll go from there. For me I guess it´s things that I find beautiful and I know it because I get this feeling about it. It can be normal mundane things or something that is concidered by society to be beautiful. Mostly I like finding beauty in everything. Beauty is a hard concept to grasp because really it´s something that every individual has to decide for themself, and of course it´s a controversial term. So even if it might be a tabo I think Beauty is what inspires me.

Tell us how is to grow up in Iceland being an artist and how is the art scene in there.

I grew up in the countryside where we had mountains in our backyard and the ocean in the front and I think that that was a great place to grow up, but you get bored a lot as well so you have to use your imagination a lot and I think that was a great way to nurture my creativity. My family moved to Reykjavik when I was 14 and I started hanging around some artists when I was 18, I was a bit shy with my own art but I got to help them out and be a part of the kind of artist collective that they were involved with which I am very grateful for because they really helped me push myself forward and pursue this art thing. I haven´t been back home for a while so I´m not exactly sure what the art scene is like there now, but I follow it a bit online and it looks like it´s opning up a lot and because it´s a small place I feel like it´s easy to approach galleries and creative spaces because you always know someone who knows someone and visibility is easier there because there aren´t so many people. I guess I would like to describe the art scene in Iceland as friendly but there is of course always cliques like everywhere else.

I lived in London for 4 years before because I was studying there, I always had it in the back of my mind that when I would graduate I would want to move on to somewhere else and it´s weird because I never really was interested in coming to Germany for some reason but then I was invited to take part in this group show in Leipzig and I decided to visit my friend who was living in Berlin at the time and I instantly had this strong connection towards it and so I decided that Berlin was the place I would move on to. The main difference between Berlin and Reykjavik would of course be the population, and the variety of the population here is so diverse which is so great. There are a lot more possibilities here and everyone is so relaxed – but in Reykjavik you can actually see mountains and the ocean which is also pretty amazing.

What would be your message to young girls around the globe?

Speak up, believe in yourself, take space and just go for it because you can do it just like anyone else can.

What do you see as your biggest challenge?

Well there are a lot of challenges, and I think challenges can also be good because if you can get through them then it always becomes a learning experience. But I would have to say that my mind is probably my biggest challenge because of all the self criticism which can be very poisonous.  But I think as long as I am aware of it It´s a good thing and sometimes you just have to say fuck it and see what happens.

If you want to follow more of Siguro’s artwork
INSTAGRAM
WEBSITE

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