Toronto Craft Alert

Reykjavík is a really intriguing place.  Though it’s a very small city (only about 100 000 people live in the downtown core), it is completely filled with art spaces: designer-run shops, tiny galleries, national galleries, public art exhibitions, city-sponsored street art.

One especially interesting part of the Reykjavík art and craft scene is the number of women’s art collectives.  There is the Icelandic Love Corporation, a small group of recent grads from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavík who have a major following outside of Iceland for their performance and video art; The Handknitting Association of Iceland, the 200+ women’s collective specializing in all things knit; Kirsubejatréð, a shop of goods handmade by 10 Icelandic women artists; and, my favourite, Start Art: a collective of 7 women who run a permanent workspace and gallery in an old house on the main street in Reykjavík.  In association with the Reykjavík art festival currently underway, Start Art is running an interactive, feminist-history-based exhibition in the house (and branching out into the street).

The Washerwomen exhibition tells the story of the women who, before the introduction of running water into their houses, had to walk about 30 minutes from town to wash their laundry in a hot spring.  Start Art took an interactive approach to honouring this small part of Reykjavík’s history: they put together a walk to the hot springs, inviting people to bring a piece of clothing with them to wash.  In the workspace at Start Art, people were invited to make soap, hang their clothing, and watch videos of re-enactments of the walk created by the collective.  I went to visit the house a few days after the walk, to see what the space was like inside.  The house is stately, one of the oldest houses in downtown Reykjavík, chosen specifically because it occupies a space between being “torn down or rebuilt (renovated)”.

As soon as you walk in, you are presented with the theme: old laundry bags over-stuffed with colourful fabrics; plaster-castings of women’s legs as they sit or stand, washing; videos of the walk to the hot springs accompanied by the humming of old songs the women would sing.  Upstairs, in the first big light-filled room, soap is displayed as art.  The work area is still set up, messy, in progress.  Around the work area are handmade soaps in different shapes, displayed in small collections; undermining the notion that art should not be useful, you are encouraged to grab some soap from its well-curated spot and use it to wash up your clothes.

Another room, facing the main street in Reykjavík, holds antique washing machines, anthropomorphized into monster-like creatures, long sheets of fabric spiraling at the base of each machine.  Meanwhile, the humming songs still resonate through the house, informing the way you take in each piece.  Then a woman comes by, says that I’m welcome to open the closets, take a drink of water from the kitchen, use the washroom if I need.  She tells me to check out the backyard, which is down the stairs, through a narrow hall lined with photographs, and the door is locked but she tells me to just pull the handle.  The backyard is small and holds one piece: a sort of labyrinth of fabric, dyed pink.

I read up a bit more on Start Art: they use an incredible range of media in their work, from resin to wool to concrete (a very Icelandic building material), iron to oil paints to cloth.  They have new exhibitions opening all the time, sometimes with other local artists.  When I walked into the street I noticed that they’d hung a clothesline, strung with skirts (still drying from the wash in the hot springs), from their window to a house across the street.  So everyone that passes has a physical invitation inside, into a space that the collective wishes to be “this and that: a window cinema, greenhouse, academy, café, seminar room, lecture hall, consulting agency, thinktank”.

Amy Borkwood is a freelance arts writer and intern at the TCA.  She is currently traveling in  Iceland, volunteering at organic farms and crafting in Reykjavík