Make a Painting of Trees Growing in a Forest

With source materials, references and paintings of Erla S. Haraldsdóttir, between 2012-15.

What would a relational field look like when not mediated by the logic of commodity transaction?

Erla S. Haraldsdóttir’s practice unfolds through delicately expressed moments. The first is the receipt of a task. The title Make a Painting of Trees Growing in a Forest, for instance, refers to a task that Erla received, and which provoked her painting The Coloured Forest in Maine (2013). Tasks are not a test of Erla’s known capabilities; they are anticipations of, or become invitations to, encounters she may have with the unknown in herself.

The second is the nature of encounter with references, or “sources”. The references via which we make sense of the world are multiple; they could be a memory, a photograph, a fragment from a conversation, a story, a movie, a book, a piece of music, a moment from history, an artwork. Exploring a reference in order to unlock or enlarge a task affects the way aspects in a reference get emphasized. And so, the tasks Erla receives draw her into fresh entanglements.

In her practice, Erla proceeds by putting herself to a test to lose control, and then to discover and invent. Rather than being consumed by mastery of a medium, Erla’s practice, and the openness with which she elucidates it in this book, steers the conversation to questions of how and with what an artist might come to her medium.

Thick with photographs of Erla’s paintings made between 2012 and 2015, drawing tasks, references and paintings into a relationship, and with thoughtful texts on Erla’s practice by three of her interlocutors from the art field, this is a beautifully designed book on painting as both an act and a deliberate process of artistic discoveries.

(Text by Shveta Sarda, editor and translator)