Stefanía Ólafsdóttir
An interdisciplinary artist, I work across a range of mediums, including print, video, installation and performance. At the centre of my praxis is Suminagashi, the Japanese printing practice of marbling paper, which depends upon the movement of water, coloured by ink, being transferred onto card. With water as my point of departure, I make visible its invisible dance, forever circling; spiralling. From this form, the theme of natural cycles entered my world. Flowing through my own body from the earth, menstruation began to occupy my attention, and is now growing into a movement towards a larger consideration of biopolitics. I see a future in which we will have to radically rethink our relationship to nature and our place in her theatre, now that the stage is crumbling in the current climate crisis.
So I collect water from local sources and the new marbling prints are climbing up the walls into murals. The water and I create new landscapes. I print, cut and collage; Together we recollect. As a collaborator and translator I dance myself into the arms of the water, entering a conversation which interrogates my personal and physical relationship to nature. Now we walk together, the water and I, exploring what it is to be in response-ability towards each other, and what it is to perform in the age of the post-human. I perform for the trees and the birds. I am interested in what are the limits of the individual and what it means to be a community, a community of humans and non-human others. I wish to exist in my art as I wish to exist on this earth, my footprints brief and disappearing, washed away by the water.