Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson : Core

When far from home, an artist will often find inspiration in memories of form, shape and colour. For fifteen years Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (b. 1963) has combined painting with textile by making works woven of hand-dyed silk threads.

She seeks her themes in the Icelandic landscape and has, for instance, made series inspired by the Vatnajökull glacier and by the volcano Mt. Hekla. Hildur comes home to Iceland twice a year, and takes photographs on her hikes around the country. Details of her photographs – shadows of mountain peaks or glacial fissures – are isolated, cropped and enlarged.

Here Hildur shows paintings woven on a three-metre-wide loom in her studio in Cleveland. The process is complex: Hildur hand-dyes the threads before they are incorporated in the textile. In this process the original images are transformed, so that the works take on an abstract quality, or are reminiscent of the primary forms.

The exhibition Core is a two-site exhibition. Part of it was shown last year at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Born in Reykjavík, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson has lived in Cleveland, Ohio for thirty years. From 1983 through 1985, Jónsson studied architecture at Kent State University before switching her focus to studio art and studying at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Later, she returned to Kent State, where she received her BFA in 1991 and MFA in 1995.

Hildur has received numerous grants, commissions and awards, including the prestigious  Cleveland Arts Prize in 2008, Ohio Arts Council Grants, and a public commission from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.  In 2004 Hildur was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship by the Ohio Arts Council and the same year was commissioned to create works of art to be presented in that year’s Governor’s Awards in the Arts.

Her previous exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, William Busta Gallery, Cleveland, and numerous galleries and museums in Iceland. Her work resides in a number of collections, including The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Reykjavík Museum of Art, The Progressive Insurance Collection, and Cleveland Clinic Foundation.