The Gold in the Palace of Illusions
Artists are a strange lot; they speak in riddles that no-one understands. Personally, I often feel like I’m hearing the punch-line of a joke or some anecdote when I go to an art exhibition. I missed the beginning of the story so I have no means of understanding what the whole thing is about. That’s why I think that every work of art should be accompanied by an explanation. The only problem is that art is ambiguous and there is no one way to approach it. It is supposed to make us think and to elicit some sort of understanding or creativity within ourselves. That’s why there is a difference between looking at a work of art and reading the news in the dailies. This is not simply information but rather something we are meant to discover ourselves. And because we always contribute something of our own to this understanding it can never be anything but our own personal version of it.
It is with this proviso that I give an account of my own understanding of Eirún’s work. This work describes a being sitting alone in a vacuum spinning some kind of sensors or shoots of understanding out into the environment. This reminds me clearly of the lonely lot of us humans to constantly have to try and make sense of an existence that we cannot understand. We are always sending out sensors, antennae and feelers, but just like Eirún’s crochet-sensors, they slump down by our feet like deadbeats and seldom become the living shoots of wisdom and life understanding that we hoped for. It seems it does not matter how we try; we don’t understand life very well and never have.
The shoots we weave can also be seen as roots. Roots are strong and give us a sense of security and make us down-to-earth, but they also tie us down. By trying to understand the world we become more rooted in it, and so the more we mature and age, the less free we become. Maybe our shoots of wisdom are more like anchors that bind us to our own versions of the truth. At least broad-mindedness and lack of prejudice tend to be attributed to the young.
But maybe the truth in Eirún’s work is simply that we fabricate our own reality. We never discover anything, just generalise on the grounds of our own existence. We think that we understand but in fact we’re just spinning. That is a cynical thought and we will of course never know if it is true or not because our shoots are too weak. What a dilemma life is. But maybe the truth is just not in the external reality. Maybe the sensors have to lead inward to lead to some real truth about life? Maybe that’s why the work is called Palace of Illusions and the being inside it Gold? Reality is a palace of illusions but we are the treasure.
Sigrún Daníelsdóttir
Psychologist
