Sara Sigurðardóttir
Journeyman

“Those in despair are mystics - adhering to the preobject, not believing in Thous, but mute and steadfast devotees of their own inexpressible container. It is to this fringe of strangeness that they devote their tears and jouissance. In the tension of their effects, muscles, mucous membranes, and skin, they experience both their belonging to and distance from an archaic other that still eludes representation and naming.”
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun.

Journeyman, Sara Sigurðardóttir’s debut London solo show brings together a series of paintings made throughout the pandemic. For many this has been a period of great uncertainty, loss and lack of belonging; a time of reflection and reconfiguration. This series of works explores our temporality, our belonging and ultimately our return to eternity, addressing the universal questions of life, death and the afterlife.

These paintings are composed with divisions: the foreground a barrier, a threshold which opens into an alternative, unknown world. This layering of the paintings mirrors our lived experience where the foreground is our environment, the barrier is our body, and the opening our consciousness, connected to but yet somehow distinguishable from our physical being. These openings are also symbolic of those moments where we feel at one with the world. Moments of great tranquility or euphoric epiphany that we are sometimes fortunate enough to experience amongst the daily chaos. Passageways into a “Platonic” realm of order, away from our painful experiences or glimpses of light at the end of the tunnel.

Consciousness is one of life’s greatest unsolved mysteries. Some scientists suggest that consciousness comes first; that our environment is only a projection of our own limited perception and nothing is as it seems. That to alter the world, we need only to alter our perception. It is fascinating to contemplate that energy and atoms can never be destroyed, only redistributed. So what once existed will never cease to exist, it can only take on a new reality. The paintings meditate on the metaphysical relationship between body and consciousness and transformation of material from one state to the next.

There are repeated symbols/ motifs which take on different identities throughout the show. The reflective orbs symbolise selfhood and the cut diamond is our essence, stripped of the mirage of self. The butterfly wings, woven out of muscular tissue suggest the potential and promise for renewal, rebirth and positive transformation. The flayed body is a symbol of the universal human, regardless of gender or race, the shared human experience of temporality and change.

Sara Sigurðardóttir is a Visual Artist, b. 1993 in Reykjavik, Iceland. She currently lives and works in London, UK. Sara graduated with an MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art in 2019, a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the Art Institute of Cumbria in 2016 and a Higher Diploma in Drawing from Reykjavik School of Visual Arts in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and in Iceland.