Miriam Bettin, Organizing Principles, Overgaden
Water on water, movement over movement, waves over waves, breathing following breathing, affirmation coming over affirmation – Sóley Ragnarsdóttir’s forms of existence
by Miriam Bettin
“Let’s think: the sea is terrifying; of course, when its whole mass stands up and creates havoc with its waves, we run for shelter. But she’s more treacherous than that; she calms down, and her being then unfolds fully, and whoever looks then at her long enough is mesmerized, is out of his own being, transmuted… that person will rather drown in her than continue to face that attraction which keeps the universe being.” – Etel Adnan, Night
Walking by the sea, blinking. They are looking at you, you are looking back. EYES as a gateway to the soul are a recurring motif in Sóley Ragnarsdóttir’s work. As large-format sculptures hanging from the ceiling (Havet som en billedfabel // The Sea as a Picture Fable, 2021) or as pictorial elements in her paintings, they function as a focus point. In her work, otherwise composed of pattern and rhythm – dots and dashes, checker and flowers – the eyes activate the space and animate the surface while wavy brushstrokes resemble the structure of water or fur (Untitled, 2021). Yet the living beings remain incorporeal, dissolving as pattern and into other (both organic and synthetic) matter, among them amber, shells, resin, epoxy, pressed flowers, sunflower seeds, plastic stones and sparkles. The creaturely features are all the more emphasized with her paintings standing on curved feet.
Following Donna Haraway’s INTERSPECIES theory, Sóley Ragnarsdóttir outlines a proposition for a different way of being, one that is neither human nor animal, that is genderless, ageless, and bodiless. Also it can be understood as a concept for an inhabitable world in times of crisis when climate change and the pandemic bring forth inequalities all the more: distribution of resources, access to health care and education, drawing on (economic) reserves and a social net, the privilege of staying home, and having safe spaces. Judith Butler therefore suggests to dismantle rigid forms of individuality in order to “imagine the smaller part that human worlds must play on this earth whose regeneration we depend upon—and which, in turn, depends upon our smaller and more mindful role”.
Ragnarsdóttir’s occupation with the (hyper-) decorative follows the tradition of Arts and Crafts from the mid 19th century as well as the PATTERN AND DECORATION movement of the mid 70s – movements that are originally associated with female* labor. Embraced by queer and feminist identities for its “ornament’s decorative excess” and belittled by patriarchy for its kitsch, primitivism and “lack of conceptual depth”, P&D’s surface over subject principle was a welcome opportunity by the sexist art world to degrade and sideline a movement in which women* played the dominant role.
To assume that the decorative cannot by definition be political or moral is misguided. Juliane Rebentisch concludes in her reflections on Jack Smith’s camp, an aesthetic style and sensibility equally known for its oppulence, as follows: “(…) the two spaces – aesthetic space and moral space – are closely intertwined, not only with respect to camp’s contribution to a critical stance that reads history in nature, but also with respect to a critical melancholy that enables the experience of joy that comes with reading nature in history.” Against Adolf Loos‘ infamously misogynist and colonialist stigma of “ornament as crime” and despite all their decorative effects, ornaments have always been symbolically relevant and crucial for the observing of and commenting on the world: „To this very day, they still serve artists as a tool to reflect on their own culture and criticize, for instance, political systems, the traditional roles imposed on women, social conventions and expectations.“ With P&D’s roots in Islamic art, the turn to the ornamental also meant a radical shift from the formal rigor, minimal and rationalist concepts of Western Modern art by reclaiming fantasy, color, diversity, variation of form, sensuality, seduction, and the affective – thus resulting in a broad accessibility, flat hierarchies, and democratization.
Tides, yes, breathing, love being a tide coming, and receding, a pendular insanity, as impatient in its regularity as this gaze on the inbuilt instability of liquid metals.
Noteworthy is Ragnarsdóttir’s use of material from industries and activities at the SEASIDE (fishing, boating, surfing, amber hunting) that stems from her fascination for her very surroundings. Studies of nature are predominant, and diverse knowledge production and local social habits, patterns, techniques are put into play: from the Danish shore, where Sóley Ragnarsdóttir currently lives, and from Iceland, where she was born.
Starting point for Ragnarsdóttir’s work with popular CRAFTS such as decoupage lies in another biographical source: her mother’s collection of napkins dating back to 1975, the same time in which P&D emerged. The artist is using the manifold napkins as a base layer, painting them partially over with evenly distributed, acrylic dots and over-decorating them with all kinds of little treasures, eventually presenting them on oversized napkin holders from metal (Napkins at the end of my world, 2021). What is shown on a small scale with napkins (in its use of pattern and style), continues in the medium of wallpapers to infinity: Wallpapers are characterized by the repetition of one and the same motif, which is constantly connected in harmonious transitions along the wall and must therefore be suitable for the so-called rapport on all four sides with the potential of endless duplication and continuation. “It is no coincidence that the word ‘pattern’ also evokes the pattern-like and the exemplarily good, which (…) seems to contain a timeless concept of beauty. No matter how different flower patterns have been, it is always true that they never spread anything negative before our eyes, never withered, never sad, never death, but always the reverse side of it. Only affirmation of existence and joy of nature, constantly summer glow and bloom and splendor and especially the spread abundance.” Ragnarsdóttir’s wallpapers, produced in collaboration with artist Joon Yeon Park, are compositions of digitally traced brushstrokes and patterns out of recurring joyful elements like roses, butterflies, dots, and eyes. They offer an anti-white cube, a more domestic space for her paintings to inhabit and therefore to embrace and exaggerate the decorative moment to infinity.
Empty shells lie on the beach in hours always uncertain.