MATERNAL PATTERNS
Each blue square corresponds to a picture of a face in Borghildur’s family on the maternal side, both of people alive and deceased. If we imagine that the squares replaced the photographs on the wall, we would be looking at a large sky-blue plane. What would that plane be? To us who have seen the work it would be more than just a blue suface, because we would know of the faces behind and we could easily imagine even more faces hidden behind. Is the blue plane then the Great Mist, Chronos and Lethe who in unison endeavour to deface everything and everyone? And are the faces then Borghildur´s heroic attempt to resist the relentless time? Something like this can no doubt be said about family photo albums in general. Perhaps we can see this work as an extract from a family album, an elevated family album, family-photo-album-art.
But not only as that. Borghildur isn’t just wrestling with forgetfulness but with time itself. For what is time? “So long as no one asks I know it well; if I wish to explain it to the one who asks I know not,” said St. Augustine. There is no need to remind that we human beings are temporal creatures: We live in the now which constantly slips through our hands, and the past and the future are not there for us. We are nevertheless often have the hunch that the future and the past are there, just as real as the slimy present. When we see the panorama from the edge of Kambar or look into a cafe in Reykjavik, we grasp a number of things in a single blow. We instantly see how they relate in space. The temporal doesn’t present itself like that in our experience. We may however try to so present it, and it may be just that which Borghildur is attempting in this work. There she is in good companpy, for doesn’t art consist in showing what cannot be shown or saying what cannot be said.