Ragna Róbertsdóttir’s minimalistic roots reach back to the early 1980s, beginning with her earliest experimentations with textiles and organic materials that were inherently common to the Icelandic environment. Róbertsdóttir approaches her work methodically, leaving each element with enough space to define its own presence of being. To fully appreciate the gravity of her art, one needs to merely imagine taking a walk into one of Iceland’s many austere landscapes. It feels less like a trek into somewhere and more like a journey elsewhere. Her pieces project an overall sensibility that harbors both the power of its materiality combined with the lightness of its becoming, whether it be salt, stone, or glass. In an interview for the newspaper Independent she said once: "I always have done it very simply. Often the story is in the material.”
"In my early works I used ‚cut outs‘ from nature, installed as floor pieces e.g. blocks of basalt, rolls of soil and piles of hemp. I also used rubber, but in a limited way, together with the natural material. In the last decade and currently still, I have been focusing on walls (and sometime ceilings) working with black lava, red pumice and shining obsidian. Also, in this case I sometimes use artificial material such as crushed glass or multicoloured plexiglass. In recent years I have been working with minerals as building blocks of my work. Pulverized, crystallized, vitrified and solidified either in nature or by hand. I have for example systematically applied mud from geothermal fields straight onto walls. The range of colours found in the mineral deposits were hot water and steam rise to the surface fascinates me. My latest works are the results of experiments with materials form the ocean, sea shell, algae, and salt."
Ragna Róbertsdóttir (*1945 in Reykjavik, Iceland) studied at The Icelandic College of Arts and Craft in Iceland and Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. Her works have been shown in a multitude of solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia, America since 1982.
