A working class, multi disciplinary artists based in Iceland, Saga Unn has been known to make spiderwebs, installations, Illustration and book art. Usually made from "re-cycled" materials, books and other items from the artist's immediate surroundings. Born in 1992, Saga graduated with a BfA in Fine Art from Lasalle College of the Arts in 2016 before going on to complete another BA in Japanese Studies at the University of Iceland in 2021 (including a year of Chinese language courses), after becoming increasingly interested in language, translation and the written word’s relationship with art.
For Saga the creative process is a natural - even animal - compulsion, and much of the artists output are meditations on the relationship between nature and the human world and the creative process. The mysteries and contradiction; what separates and connects these different worlds - art, life and nature.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Art, like life, like nature, always has this unknowable element. Always mysterious. It can be magical and it can be dangerous.
Rather than something I want to over explain and intellectualise I believe art is ultimately experiential. Out of the ordinary and with an air of mystery, art is the matter of the soul. This is not something I impose on my own or others' work as a rule, rather it is just how I would describe my own relationship with art and the creative process. A process that is natural - an irrational compulsion, the (human)animal drive. I think of my works as meditations on the mysteries I see all around me, that persist despite humans' attempts to know, explain and categorise everything. The creative process, that undefinable something that cannot be put into words of categorised.
/selected exhibitions (and other projects)
'[Tungur/舌头]'
Installation, part of the artist's residency atA4 Residency Art Center International Residency Open Call Program for the months of September and October 2024.
30. October 2024 -
‘Þýðing 2.0'
Textbook installation, exhibited in an in an industrial space as a part of Insævi, Fjarðabyggð's regional Arts Festival. Netagerðin ("the old net factory",) Neskaupstaður, Iceland.
21. June 2024 - 30. June 2024.
‘Þýðing'
Installations/Translation of the installation exhibited at Tenjinyama Art studio, Sapporo, Japan ('I don't know, I just had to' 2023.) Jensens His, Eskifjörður, Iceland.
3. December 2023 - 8. December 2023.
‘I don't know why, I just had to'
An exhibition of two separate installations created from five University text books at the Tenjinyama Art Studio, Sapporo, Japan.
5. October 2023 - 12. October 2023.
‘Göt í Lök'
A series of book art made at the Varmahlíð Artists in Residency in Hveragerði, Iceland. Repurposing sheets and other bedding destroyed by Pétur the rabbit, making books from them.
26. February 2021 - 11. March 2021.
‘How I sleep at night'
Exhibition at the end of a month long Residency at Studio Kura and part of ‘Itoshima Arts Farm’ Art Festival, Itoshima, Japan.
20. October 2018 - 28. October 2018.
‘Nr. 2 Umhverfing’
Group exhibition of regional artists in Sláturhúsið, Fljótsdalshérað, Iceland.
17. June 2018 - 7. September 2018.
‘Bitten by a radioactive artist’
Exhibition at the end of a month long Residency at Studio Kura.
26. October 2017 - 28. October 2017.
'Galdrar og Galdra-mál; Art show in an industrial space'
Installation in the tank, 'Tanknum', Djúpivogur, Ísland.
14. August 2016 - 1. September 2016.
/education
University of Iceland — MA, Exhibition Making, Mediation and Curatorship.
August 2021 - [incomplete as of now]
University of Iceland — BA, additional degree in Japanese Studies.
August 2018 - 2020.
Lasalle College of the Arts - BA Hons in Fine Art.
August 2013 - September 2016.
FB Fjölbraut Breiðholt College — Icelandic Stúdents Próf in Visual Art.
January 2010 - December 2012.