Just beyond the westernmost point of the Lansing River Trail, in a wooded grove, lies a piece of Iceland.
That is where Katrín Sigurdardóttir, the featured artist at MSU’s Broad Museum this winter, was born and grew up.
Two of Sigurdardóttir’s three works at the Broad are hard to miss — they’ll take up most of the museum’s first floor until March. It’s a bit harder to find the third one. You have to drive, walk or bike to the northwest side of town to Dietrich Park, near the Olympic Broil.
“The simplest way to put it is that I dug a hole in Iceland, I took some dirt out of the hole, and I shipped it to my studio,” the artist explained on a visit to the Broad last week. “I filtered and purified it into usable clay, formed it by hand into paving stones and I put them in a hole in the ground in Lansing, Michigan.”
A life-size photograph of the stones as they looked in Sigurdartottir’s studio, and a treasure map to the spot where they’re buried, are helpfully posted in the Broad Museum exhibit.
Most artists try to hook time like a fish; Sigurdardóttir rides it like a dolphin.
Embalming reality in the form of a perfect sculpture or painting is not her thing. The whisper of a cycle is the closest you’ll get to permanence in her work.
She didn’t fire the stones in a kiln, so time and weather (including unseasonably early ice) have already effaced the zigzag pattern of the stones, but you can still tell they are there.
“If you go to this beautiful site by the Grand River, you’ll see that the unfired clay has completely assimilated and taken on the form it had in Iceland,” she said.
To create “Namesake,” Sigurdardóttir made the earth move — literally — and calmly let it crumble through her fingers. In her main exhibit at the Broad, “Metamorphic,” memory takes the place of heavy equipment to do the endless conwwstruction work.
In the Broad’s airy main gallery, replicas of furniture and objects from the house where Sigurdadottir grew up are pinned by sunlight, like bones under the skin of time.
The pieces of furniture are both real and unreal. “They are put in crates and each time they move, they shatter,” the artist explained. “When the crate is opened, the construction of the past begins. It’s exhibited, it goes back into a crate, shatters again, and the construction of the past begins again.”
You can never go back to your childhood home, or even your ten-seconds-ago home.
The point is underscored by floor patterns under the room, based on photographs taken by international students of their far-flung homes in Australia, Kenya, Taiwan and Estonia.
Anya Sirota, an architecture professor at the University of Michigan, boiled the art’s elusive power down to “a desire for a return.” Sirota visited the Broad to check out the exhibit and join the discussion.
“It keeps cyclically tracing an impossible desire,” Sirota said. “It’s not nostalgic and it’s not Utopian. It’s something else and it’s very powerful.”
Another recent visitor to the Broad Wednesday, former curator Hesse McGraw of the San Francisco Art Institute, hadn’t seen “Metamorphic” since it was housed there two years ago. Hesse worked with Sigurdardóttir on the first round of “Metamorphic.”
Free “Metamorphic,” “Unbuilt Residences,” “Namesake”
Through March 1, 2020
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum
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