HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

For The Shipyard Paintings the artist asked a shipyard painter to paint a series of paintings using his selection of blue ship-paint leftovers found in his shed on the shipyard. Performing tasks similar to what he usually does but with a different motivation and within the context of the art history of painting rather than shipping industry his experience of work becomes akin to creative labour.

The work was made with the art-practice-as-research project Keep Frozen.

From the catalogue of Swimming Pool - Troubled Waters at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin in 2021. Text by Gudny Gudmundsdottir:

In The Shipyard Painting Series the viewer is presented with tricolour paintings; red, blue and white, that are created with the special anticorrosive paint used in the shipyards to paint the outside shell of ships. The copper oxide red on the side bottom hull is an anti-fouling paint used globally to protect the part of the ship that permanently sits under the waterline. The white is used on the ship’s deck for practical and sanitary reasons. The blue shades of the boot top recall the colours of the ocean and are the most common shades used to paint the Icelandic fishing vessel fleet. They echo the blue in the Icelandic national flag revealing the relation of national identity to fishing and the sea. It’s a simple colour combination driven by practicality and tradition. The use of tough chemical paint represents the aesthetics of the harbour in general, which is largely influenced by the eternal struggle of keeping rust at bay. Rust, created by the eternal interplay of the sea and the metals used for ship construction and harbour structures.

The Shipyard Painting Series belongs to a larger research project named Keep Frozen, that the Icelandic artist Hulda Ros Gudnadottir worked on over the course of 8 years between 2010 and 2018…

… Hulda Rós probes these mutations in a quest for identity at the same time that she makes an inquiry into the paradoxical (im)materiality of industrial development and production. In these works she zooms in on the manual labour being performed by dock-workers, ship painters and other laborers at the harbour which convey an empathic inquiry into the nature of the worker’s labour. The relationship between the artist and the workers provides an important axis within the whole project, where her presence becomes an intersection between those mutated realities. She invites the workers with their specialisations to enter into the context of the art world, and at the same time tries to translate the meanings and importance of their specialisations for her immediate surroundings.

The project testifies to the fact that labour is an essential part in the dynamic aesthetic of the harbour – if the harbour is the cultural heart of the city, the workers are the ones that keep it pumping. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, the artist seeks to portray the components of the human spirit necessary for fulfilling the arduous duties of labour. Through this angle, the multiple aspects of the non-corporeal existence of the manual labourer are brought into focus. This approach challenges the dichotomy of the material and immaterial, body and spirit.

When the vessels lie in the shipyard it is the only time that the tricolour becomes visible, like a fish out of water the ships in all their power become helpless, immobile. Majestically they rise high from the ground and the viewer looks up at a simple tricolour image of copper red, blue and white, a tricolour image also representing the trinity of earth, sea and sky. The Shipyard Painting Series mobilizes the viewer to embark upon a personal journey through their own imagination and experiences, where the past, present and the future accommodate possible new realities.