Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir

Every Time We Grow (2026)

In 2016, I was invited to participate in a residency at Teckningsmuseet in collaboration with Finnish artist Katja Tukiainen. The museum would be transformed into a shared studio space where Katja and myself would both work, creating an exhibition that would open at the end of our stay. We met for the first time in Laholm. Having laughed a bit at this situation we were being placed in, something clicked almost immediately. Ideas started to flow, and decisions were easy to make. The stay at Teckningsmuseet turned out to be a very positive experience and a fruitful one.

Katja and I have a very good professional connection, but also a rare kind of friendship. When we met again in Halmstad in 2025, this was no different from our first meeting in Laholm. Ideas started to flow, and we saw a way to connect our visual worlds for the Markings exhibition. This time we will again be working side by side creating our separate installations but meet in the middle with our different worlds of images to merge into a collaborative center.

In my practice, I am driven by the process of persistent drawing, exploring human emotions often in their most exaggerated form. Things we find beautiful or funny the next person can find terrible or sad. Often, we experience opposing feelings inside ourselves about the very same thing. I believe the same emotional whirlwinds exist in all living beings in nature. We all coexist as a whole and as such we must communicate and try to understand each other. Sometimes we even try to become one another. But usually we fail, because every single one of us is unique. Nevertheless, we all share a strong need to belong. My drawings exist as a language that translates this complexity, as they explore the push and pull of human existence and draw attention to the often-blurred boundaries between human and non-human. For this exhibition I have created a site-specific installation discussing the countless units that make us human.

– Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir

Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir is an Icelandic artist who works mostly on paper, often in large formats. These drawings can be transformed into animations or used in installations and larger murals. Her visual world is enigmatic and personal, with a mythopoetic imagery that explores the vague boundary between the human and the non-human.

http://www.siggabjorg.net/

For the residency Katja Tukiainen vs Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir (Laholm Municipality, 2016), two Nordic artists were brought together to jointly explore the nature and future of drawing. The encounter between their practices illustrated the evolution and artistic breadth of the medium by combining drawing with painting, sculpture, animation, and video.