Herma / Reykjavík / 2025Beauty moves like the tides: shifting, retreating, returning. Just like the ebb and flow of the tide, beauty is never static, but fluid. Often it surges in, dazzling and inescapable. At other times, it slips beneath the surface, almost invisible, waiting to be noticed.
This exhibition began with a simple question:
What is beauty?
The intention was not to try to define it, but to follow the path where the question led. The question took me on a journey, a journey with no clear answer, only shifting reflections.
Beauty is elusive; never singular, never fixed. It changes with time, culture, and context. It is shaped by the gaze, a fluid concept that is sometimes defined for us. It surrounds us, embedded in the ordinary, in what has been forgotten, in what has been discarded. The ever-changing nature of beauty suggests that its existence may be all around us in every object, on every surface.
Beauty is not always found; it must be revealed. Like a painting hung in a white gallery or a stone cast in gold, beauty often emerges through context. The frame, the pedestal, the spotlight. These do not create value; they reveal it. They invite us to look again. To pay attention.
The objects in this exhibition were shaped by nature, found along the shore, gifted by the ocean, formed by the tides, time, and chance.
They are a collaboration between the sea and the artist. Fragments that once served other purposes, now stilled and honored. My role is not to alter them, but to create a space. A context, where their beauty can be seen.
By placing these objects, forms, and ideas in a new context, this work invites you to pause and reconsider. To find beauty in the broken, wonder in the weathered, and value in what we have learned to discard.
An object becomes a form; the form becomes beauty.
Beauty is everywhere.
Not because it conforms to standards, but because it exists and in the right moment, the right setting, with the right gaze, it becomes visible.
This is an invitation:
To look again.
To notice more.
To understand that beauty is not a fixed concept, but a shifting
presence, always there, waiting to be seen.
Ocean archives
Forsaken materials once carried by the tides, washed up to the shore to be gathered and placed into a quiet order.
Becoming a shoreline of its own.
Sorted by colour, by texture, by shape, each fragment was given a position, a pause.
What had previously been in constant motion is now stilled but the rhythm of the ocean still lingered on their surface, in their edges, in the way they mirror and echo one another.
These items, shaped by time and water, don’t hold a singular identity. They are artefacts of elsewhere, of before, of hidden history. Here they become visible in a different way. The act of organising becomes a form of noticing, a way of tracing beauty as it moves between chaos and control.
The archive is not permanent. It is reassembled after each return from the shore, shifting slightly never the same.
Just like the tides it resists stillness.
