Katrin Sigurdardottir examines landscapes and architectures, which often come from her homeland of Iceland. She reconstructs their structural elements based on her memory and imagination, exploring the psychological relationships between people and landscapes. In an early project, she created miniatures of a park in Reykjavik, located near her childhood home, and Central Park in New York, where she currently lives, based on her memory of each place. She also fabricated a city in a small container and a natural environment in a suitcase, which became portable, detached landscapes reflecting the traces of her migration.
Sigurdardottir discovered archival plans for houses in Reykjavik from the 1920-30’s, and conceived the project "Unbuilt Residences in Reykjavik, 1920-1930." These are plans for houses that were drafted by the first generation of local Icelandic architects who began to work as the country was struggling for independence from Denmark. Houses had even been planned for specific ...
Full Description
Katrin Sigurdardottir examines landscapes and architectures, which often come from her homeland of Iceland. She reconstructs their structural elements based on her memory and imagination, exploring the psychological relationships between people and landscapes. In an early project, she created miniatures of a park in Reykjavik, located near her childhood home, and Central Park in New York, where she currently lives, based on her memory of each place. She also fabricated a city in a small container and a natural environment in a suitcase, which became portable, detached landscapes reflecting the traces of her migration.
Sigurdardottir discovered archival plans for houses in Reykjavik from the 1920-30’s, and conceived the project "Unbuilt Residences in Reykjavik, 1920-1930." These are plans for houses that were drafted by the first generation of local Icelandic architects who began to work as the country was struggling for independence from Denmark. Houses had even been planned for specific locations and addresses; however, they were never built. Sigurdardottir is inspired by the unbuilt architecture of her hometown. She has made exact models of these houses at her studio in Brooklyn, and continues to blog the creative process in order to develop a visual diary. Those houses, having never existed in the physical land of Reykjavik, now have the opportunity to be realized by the hand of a contemporary artist who knows the city as home; however, such is carried out far away from the original location. Perhaps, in a sense, to keep the houses in an imaginary world, she smashes the models upon their completion, sending them back into memory.
- Yukie Kamiya
Work metadata
- Year Created: 2005
- Submitted to ArtBase: Wednesday May 18th, 2005
- Original Url: http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/unbuilt/
- Permalink: http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/unbuilt/
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Work Credits:
- Katrin, creator
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