Through distinct yet complementary approaches, they reflect on how fragments—whether physical, textual, or emotional—can be gathered, reassembled, and transformed into new forms of storytelling and perception.
Drawing from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Elísabet Olka Guðmundsdóttir investigates how objects and materials become vessels for personal histories and collective experiences. Le Guin challenges the dominant narrative of power and conquest, instead proposing that the most significant human invention is not the spear, but the container—a means of holding, collecting, and preserving. This notion resonates throughout the artist's practice, where fragments of language are embedded into ceramic surfaces. In these works, text becomes a tactile archive, offering a poetic montage that captures the intimacy of daily life and the quiet power of care and connection.
Parallel to this, Högna Heiðbjört Jónsdóttir's practice revolves around a lifelong fascination with color and its emotional resonance. Recalling early memories of selecting colored pencils from a local supply store, this intuitive relationship with hue and tone has evolved into a meticulous process of collecting and assembling paint swatches. These compositions, resembling puzzles, are shaped by instinct rather than a predetermined image. Each work is an exploration of how color fills space—not as a fixed entity but as a shifting, subjective experience. The puzzle format becomes a means of both containment and expansion, allowing the artist to transform ordinary materials into evocative fields of sensation and memory.
Högna Heiðbjört Jónsdóttir (b. 1997) lives and works in Copenhagen. She studied fine art at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in The Netherlands and earned a BA from Iceland University of the Arts. Högna is first and foremost a painter and relies on instinct and/or systematic methods to create her varied works. Högna's recent work is characterized by collection and arrangement, combined with the use of strong, synergetic colors. Everyday objects and the beauty inherent in the daily grind can be found in her work, in which she recontextualizes the familiar and thereby draws attention to things that most people overlook.
Elísabet Olka Guðmundsdóttir is an Icelandic artist based in Copenhagen. She works across various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, plaster, and clay. Her practice often combines diverse techniques and materials to create abstract compositions. In her recent works, Elísabet crafts small ceramic tiles, each painted individually and assembled into a cohesive whole—a poetic montage where fragments come together to form new narratives. Her drawings and paintings frequently depict human figures and emotional states, exploring inner journeys, inherited stories, and intergenerational trauma. Additionally, she creates dreamlike abstract drawings that seek to capture fleeting sensory impressions.
The dialogue between these two practices echoes Gaston Bachelard's concept of "the poetics of space," where physical environments hold layers of memory and emotional depth. Both artists engage with the act of gathering and arranging as a method of storytelling—whether through the physical layering of text and ceramic or the careful assembly of color fragments. Their works resist grand narratives, instead foregrounding the overlooked, the intimate, and the everyday.
In Montage, the artists invite viewers to consider how we collect, preserve, and interpret the world around us. Through their poetic and tactile approaches, they reveal the beauty in fragments—the unfinished, the incomplete—and the ways in which these pieces shape our understanding of identity, place, and memory.
Kilde:
Wild horses Gallery
Wild horses Gallery