HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

Catalogue text by Gudny Gudmundsdottir of Gallery Gudmundsdottir:

The Shipyard Painting Series

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. The project was an art-practice-as- research project comprising a vast body of works, site specific installations, a full- length documentary, video installations, a publication, sculptures, photographs and paintings. Through the research, the artist is confronting her childhood memories of Reykjavík and follows the developments and gentrification processes of the cityscape up until current times. In a pursuit to contextualize the psycho- logical rift left by the economic crash in 2008, the artist turns her face to the sea. The harbour, a place of translation between sea and society as well as the hub of ‘real’ Icelandic wealth, came into focus. She uses the Reykjavik harbour as a prism through which to explore the rupture and change in Icelandic society caused by the economic crisis and changes to the global fishing industry.

Embedded in Iceland’s traditional economic role as a primary producer is the cultural memory and material heritage of a ‘fishing community’. This heritage forms the project’s vantage point. As an agent of cultural memory, the artist teases out layers of contradiction and coherence existing in and around the harbour. The work deals with human relationships to the ocean through economic and social activity. It is a poetic case study of the Reykjavik harbour and how it relates to society, economy and global networks. With the work, the local and micro is used as a stepping stone to- wards the macro level of global process- es, opening up worlds that are unseen, but present everywhere.

These rapid transformations, occur- ring as the Icelandic nation integrated a global economy, have produced ‘mutated realities’ that coexist at the harbour, the labour of the fishing industry – which on the one hand remains hidden for most, but on the other hand becomes more and more visible through the lens of tourists and the growing cultural class. Hulda Rós probes these mutations in a quest for identity at the same time that she makes an inquiry into the paradox ical (im)materiality of industrial devel- opment and production. In these works she zooms in on the manual labour being performed by dock-workers, ship paint- ers 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.

Leonie Hugendubel writes about the ghostnet rescue on the exhibition newsblog:

A ghost net arrived at the exhibition. Once floating and diving in the cold and salty waters of the Atlantic, it was stranded and blended into the green-brown, gray-yellow-blue shore of Iceland's north until it was found a month ago and transported to Berlin, to Künstlerhaus Bethanien. On July 17th, the artist Hulda Ros Gudnadottir searched for and found the ghost net in Kollafjarðarnes, a fjord on the eastern side of Iceland's West Fjords. The net was moved from Strandir to the main road with the help of three people from Worldwide Friends and Ragnar, a farmer from Heydalsá. Again and again they washed the ghost net in the water. After a night at the school Reykjaskoli, the net and the artist, Hulda and the ghost, drove towards Reykjavik, the washed net drying in the driving wind. Many hands helped the artist there to straighten and clean the ropes: the curator Helga Oskarsdottir, Eduardo from Venezuela and the art-loving Hekla. The net was boxed on July 23rd and shipped the next day. On August 14, the box arrived at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The ghost net now lies as part of Hulda Ros Gudnadottir's work in the exhibition Swimming Pool - Troubled Waters.

A ghost net is a fishing net that has been lost or abandoned in the ocean. The nets floating and lying in the sea or found on coasts continue to function as uncontrolled traps for marine wildlife. Animals get caught and injured in the cords and lines. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) up to 25,000 nets sink each year in European waters alone. The nets are partially plastic and divide into small particles that do not dissolve but become part of the food chain as microplastics. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), ghost nets accounted for more than forty percent of the giant Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2018.

Hulda Ros Gudnadottris works with the aesthetics of the harbor and those working there. The Ghost Net points not only to the impact of the fishing industry on the environment, but also to the effort and labor involved in transporting and cleaning (the net and the environment from the net) by the artist.