Litten Nystrøm is from Aarhus, Denmark and since 2011 has been living and working in Seyoisfjörour, Iceland. She was the first of four artists who took part in Artlink’s 2017 Residency Programme. In her proposal for the residency she wrote about a temporal landscape. Just as a geography of space contains both natural features and features created by human beings so people live in a temporal landscape that contains natural, cyclical features (day/night or the return of the seasons) and features created by human-imposed systems, such as the ‘working day’, the ‘weekend’, domestic time or work time, private time or public time. Fort Dunree became an inspiring location to develop these ideas, allowing Litten to explore the physical and historical properties of this particular place and examine the transforming abilities and limitations of memory.
On site the artist researched how the current condition of the fort and found material (physical residue, found pigment and dust from the site) combined with light-sensitivity, could serve as a direct document, and physical embodiment of time. An ongoing preoccupation of Litten’s is the search for a conceptual way of recording walks. During her time in Ireland she extended this practice to work with a Hectograph. By means of this old duplication technique, details from walks around the fort area accumulated on the continuing pages of a series of artist’s books. At Fort Dunree a large spectrum of colours, applied at different time periods, cover the interiors of buildings. Litten used these to
create multicoloured powders containing layers of time, historical relics, signs of use and life. These found pigments became the medium for a series of works based on the interiors from which the pigments originate
Litten has exhibited widely in Scandinavia, as well as managing an artist’s residency program in East Iceland and working on art projects in rural areas as part of artists’ group RoShamBo.
On May 10th 2017, Litten presented her work and discussed the artist community in the small town of Seydisfjordur in East Iceland where she lives. She also demonstrated how to make and print using a Hectograph. A hectograph is a smooth piece of gelatine used to make multiple prints off a single master sheet. Originally it was used in the early 1900’s as a means of producing multiple copies.
- May 31, 2017
