It’s unusual to see Lilja Birgisdóttir outside Fischersund — the dark little house and wonderfully scented perfumery and art collective she runs with her siblings and family, where she’s often found greeting customers, offering homemade snaps, or emotionally reciting a poem. Today, she’s traded her Wednesday Addams-esque black dress for a blue one, and Fischersund for the white cube of Þula gallery. Her exhibition, Um leið og þú lítur undan (The Moment You Look Away), lets a flicker of colour seep through otherwise monochrome photographs.
Between photo and painting
“This exhibition is about noticing all these small moments of everyday magic that could easily pass,” says Lilja as we walk through the exhibition space. On the walls hang eight large-scale black-and-white photos taken by Lilja with a film camera, developed by her, and hand-coloured with transparent oil paints.
In addition to her work with Fischersund, Lilja has for years been working across photography, performance, video, sound, and installation. She has long been active with the artist-run gallery Kling & Bang and is now represented by Þula.
“It’s kind of a merge of photography and painting. It’s an old technique,” Lilja speaks of the method she’s using. “It was used before colour photography, when you had to hand-colour black-and-white photographs. But I’m using it in a new way — instead of just colouring the photo normally, I use the colours to create a focus in the image, a focus on the magic.”
What Lilja means by “magic” are the small, mundane moments we pass by every day — flowers breaking through asphalt on the corner of a house, the sky reflecting in a puddle, or dandelion spores carried by the wind into a passerby’s hair.
“It was just a small moment. You get all these dandelions in your hair, and then you just take them out. It’s this tiny moment of beauty that I was able to catch,” she says, looking at the photo of a girl with colourful dandelion spores spread in hair with a signature yellow, pink, blue, and purple.
“These oil colours are very special,” says Lilja. “I’ve been collecting them since I was studying photography at The Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, and I stumbled on an old estate of a photographer, who found these colours. I’ve been fascinated by them since, developing methods for many years.”
The colours Lilja uses have their own colour palette — they seem more artificial than the colours seen in nature, like pastel blues or bright, almost unnatural yellows. “They’re very vibrant. I thought that was perfect for this — the colours somehow represent the magic. You have these really vibrant colours against the grey, kind of dull, dusty images.”
Photo by Art Bicnick
Seeing beauty in every frame
With the frames, each of the images on display is 103 x 148 cm. “This is my biggest body of work ever,” Lilja admits. “I’ve never made prints this size before. It was very physical — normally, you develop the papers in trays, in these liquids. But because the prints are so big, I couldn’t use trays, so I had to find my own method.”
“I use the colours to create a focus in the image, a focus on the magic.”
Even with the challenges and makeshift methods it required, Lilja always knew the photos had to be big. “The moments I’m talking about are so little and insignificant — that’s why I wanted to give them this importance,” she smiles.
She stops in front of one of those moments: a photograph of an almost heart-shaped puddle, the sunset reflecting in the water. “This is one of my favourites,” Lilja says. “I was walking downtown by the gas station… it had been raining really heavily the day before, and in the evening, there was this beautiful sunset. I was just walking and saw the beautiful sunset in the puddles — as soon as I took one step further, it was gone. So I went back [and took the photo].”
As a photographer, Lilja admits it wasn’t an amazing picture, so she was hesitant to give it a big platform. But once she hand-coloured it, the image took on a new life. “Now, I’m a little bit proud of it,” she says.
“Being in art school kind of rewires your brain,” she continues. “When I was studying in The Hague, with all the assignments, you were always going out into the world looking for a beautiful frame — even in the ugly, dirty, and unnoticed. I always have that in the back of my mind. I’m constantly seeing everything as a frame, noticing everything.”
The state of the world, and how glued we are to our screens, was also something Lilja couldn’t ignore. “I have a teenage daughter, and a lot of young people today are unhappy because we’re just being programmed by our phones and social media that the only way to be truly happy is if we own this, look like that, or get this car. It’s all figured out for us. I wanted this also to be a reminder that if you look out for these hidden moments that happen every day, it can make you happier. You start to be more thankful,” she says.
Photo by Art Bicnick
Planning the magic
Having some insight into the upcoming projects Lilja and Fischersund’s art collective are working on, I’m curious to know how she manages to stay productive while juggling her career as an artist. “This is the most organised I’ve ever been,” she admits with a smile. “When you run such a tight schedule with running a home, running a business, and having an art career, you really have to be organised.”
Sometimes, being organised just means knowing when to ask for help. “I asked our general manager, ‘Can you just make a schedule for me?’ Everything — when I need photos to be shot, when I need to be done in the darkroom, when I need to be done with painting, when the pictures need to go into framing. She did it, and I just stuck to that.”
“But of course, I have an amazing partner. We are a really good team,” Lilja adds, speaking about musician and composer Kjartan Holm. “He helps me in my art practice and in Fischersund, and he helped me with the soundscape of the exhibition.” For the two rooms, The Moment You Look Away is spread throughout, Kjartan created two soundscapes — one more subtle, capturing a person walking in the city, and another, as Lilja puts it, “representing the magic.”
You don’t need a giant sculpture to make people stop and look. Often, the art is hiding in a puddle, a drain grate, or an overgrown garden in town that nobody takes care of. The Moment You Look Away makes you notice the things you usually pass right by.
“It was very beautiful at the opening. This grown man came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for reminding me to see the beauty in the everyday.’ You get so distracted in this race of running around, you forget to stop, to look around, notice, and slow down. That made me happy,” she concludes.
Lilja Birgisdóttir’s exhibition The Moment You Look Away is on view at Þula until September 21. A guided tour with Lilja and the exhibition curator, Jessamyn Fiore, will take place on Saturday, August 30, from 16:00 to 17:00.