Dazed & Confused Gabriela Fridriksdóttir Inspiration can be found in everything: Gabríela Fridriksdóttir You will probably know the Icelandic artist Gabriela Fridriksdóttir from her amoebic illustrations that featured on Björk’s Family Tree/ Greatest Hits album. Her images have a hypnotic element about them, as if produced in some lyrical trance. This lyricism was fully explored at this year’s Prague Biennale where her illustrations were animated to the sound of her own music. Since she graduated in 1998, Fridriksdóttir has cut quite a figure in Iceland’s art scene and in 1999 won the Penninn Prize (Iceland’s equivalent to Beck’s Futures). Her interests carefully hover between two very different sides of her artistic practice. There is a side that revels in producing images of intangible, alien-like creatures, yet there is also a more direct, vocal side to her work. This can be seen in the piece entitled Oralarsehole where the speaker, in this mixed media work, tells of the ‘analmouth’s existence’. A painter, sculptress and musician, Fridriksdóttir is also a poet. Her nom de guerre for her poetic side is a character named ‘Morris’. In her poetry installations, Morris is visually represented as a man with a macabre head sculpted out of bread dough. Gabriela has also brought out a book of illustrations published by Smekkleysa/ Bad Taste: the book contains 50 of her artworks and is accompanied by a CD of her own music. Here, Fridriksdóttir – who talks of it being impossible to ‘find out where inspirations happen, they kind of sneak into a certain mental twilight zone’ – takes us through a selection of her inspirations. The Beakless Eagle A recent fixation which I can’t seem to flee from is ‘the cry of the beakless eagle’. It’s an echo of how I envision a certain human condition; a ruthless scavenger and a beast of prey being unable to devour its victim and therefore unable to carry out the purpose of the hunt. Taxidermy Greedily I gather all the ‘happy hours’. After harvesting those moments I become the mental executioner decapitating all, piling it into a blotch like figure or an abstract splotch of dough. The humour, the ugliness and the beauty, the pathetic and the sympathetic are being executed, similar to the job of a taxidermist. One could say I am inspired by taxidermy. People The unknown soldier; grandfather; mothers; child; the horse whisperer... Favourite artists? Sergio Leone, Jan Svankmayer, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniel Agust, Björk Gudmundsdóttir, Einar Orn, King Creole and the Coconuts, Halli Johnsson, Matthew Barney, Asmundur Asmundsson...		Next article >