Elín Elísabet opening

Outposts
Exhibition text by Joe Keys

 

“What is the point of making a picture which is meant to be like Nature, when everyone knows that this is the one thing that a picture cannot be and should not be and must not be?”
Halldór Laxness, The Atom Station

 

Elín Elísabet is a portrait painter – especially when she draws the landscape, especially when she paints the landscape, and when she paints one place, she is really painting two places, and two people, and their two histories.

Like many of us who find ourselves in the process of dealing with, documenting, or paying attention to a family history, she bears the weight of stories passed down. It is an abstract responsibility. There is no true beginning and the end is continually pushed further away. It is not something bestowed, it is a decision made when confronted with the past. Some can ignore this urge, while others take it on, though the task has no conclusion, and how could it?

This last summer, Elín Elísabet split her time between two remote farms, in an attempt to preserve thought – to recall things she inherited through stories, from relatives, from a singular and collective memory. She has been painting outside, in Kollsvík in the West Fjords, where her grandfather was born, and Syðra-Lón in the East, where her grandmother was born. Clambering around the landscape, looking for something that resonates; making a choice of what to document, what to remember, what to focus on – until the weather changes for the worse. She has an intimacy with these landscapes. It’s not as if she is one with nature, but spending such a long time in one place, the birds begin to ignore you, a fox might forget itself. Pastels scratching over roughly primed, wooden boards, the rustling contents of a lunchbox, they fall into place in the subtle cacophony that is outside.

In Borgarnes, where Elín Elísabet’s grandparents met and spent their lives together, she presents her paintings. Landscapes – close-up landscapes, like portraits or family photos, the type of landscape where you do not see the horizon, just the moss and the lichen. Stone and grass, and plants she remembered the names of from outings with her grandfather. Recesses and parts unpainted, not painting as painting. Within these textures are fragments of poem, cut from white printer paper, suggestions of titles, suggestions of thoughts that have passed as she is slowly recalling.

How could one remember everything?