At which scale does one notice the yarns? We were greeted with a homemade meal Annie and Hrefna had cooked together. They had brewed iced coffee, which was awaiting us in the fridge. We spent the afternoon in the depths of the garden, surrounded by trees, berries and an old log which during the course of our gathering would end up being an improvised pedestal for a yet unmodified handbag.
While the rather wobbly camping table around which we were sitting was not quite cleared off and leftovers of different sorts as well as half-emptied glasses of coffee were still scattered around its surface, books and another handbag quickly joined the setting. Parallels arose between the very idea of their exhibition and our collectively lived situation.
As argued by Elizabeth Fisher and later revisited by Ursula K. Le Guin , they are very likely to be the first human tool and might therefore have been an early and most loyal partner throughout anthropogenesis.
Our gathering was not only with Annie and Hrefna, but equally with their series of newly created sculptures, or handbags. In fact, similarly to words, handbags turn out to be containers: Carriers of meaning, social status, intentions, secrets. We here use the word «handbag», but we invite you to think of a receptacle, a sack, a pouch, a clutch, a backpack, a suitcase, a sachet, a briefcase, a Ziploc, a shopping bag, a purse, a baby sling, a basket, a bucket, a duffel, a tote, a knapsack, a holdall⦠Handbags carry the voices of many untold stories.
They can be mere works of art presented in a white cube. They can have charisma and personality, they can have a persona of their own or be an inanimate object in an installative context, they can be everything in between. They can be pretexts for small talk and foster passionate conversations while waiting for dessert and coffee. Not only is it to be understood as a convivial outcome of Fiction but it is also the action of collecting which is at the very base of their process.
