Swedish artist Nadine Byrne recently had a great exhibition in Stockholm. Coinciding with the show was the release of a small book with the same title: Inward World. It's released by Moon Space Books and is definitely a little treasure that should be ordered a.s.a.p. Here's the little text I wrote for it...
Nadine Byrne: Inward World
The intuitive search for existential meaning constitutes one very primal part of the artist’s work. Where to find it? And what is it? We can sink into ourselves, reflecting fragmented shards of life as we sink deeper into the soul. Or we can open our minds and eyes and look at the explosive, energetic outside world, to ultimately find that there’s essentially no big difference between these two perspectives. We still are. We still exist. We still have the ability to express and share.
Nadine Byrne’s work initially strikes me as innocent and pure in its display of seemingly random objects and creations. A set of stones tied together with rope, a walking staff straight out of the forest, elaborate costumes designed to reflect colours from Il Carso rocks in Italy, hand sewn patterns originally designed by her mother, film sequences and photographs of sundazed elements. Byrne’s art appears so silent, sensitive and private. We are allowed inside for a brief moment or two, to take part of an almost childlike joy of poetic exploration.
But when we rest a while and look again, we see patterns clearly. In these patterns, there is movement, development, research, curiosity. Rock, stones and earth become pigments that colour textiles designed for inclusion on photographic negatives and super 8 film. Clay becomes sculptures that appear to bear organic traits, again textile-like with creases and openings. The costumes become full of life when assembled by Byrne’s hands but even more so when worn. We go from elemental, primal, silent over intuitive and creative to distinctly magical and sensually stating. We grow out of nature and reflect its glory and mystery back, seemingly in all directions.
If we accept this intuitive development/direction as Byrne’s creative foundation, we are easily impressed (literally) by the elegance she uses to weave her spells. We can always choose to stay on a formal level and partake of the beauty that she has molded entirely by herself (with a little help from Mother Nature). Or we can delve deeper into the existential sphere and regard her work as some kind of organic proto-art: totemistic, magical, spiritual… When natural items are restructured, there is always an underlying meaning, whether consciously known or not. Again, we are welcome to look and wonder/wander but there will never be any easy answers. We become spellbound and curious victims, not of arrogance or reference but rather of sheer poetry.
Nadine Byrne and her inward world is as nature itself/herself: faint, sometimes evanescent, mysterious, dreaming, beautiful but always challenging, always defying logic and preconceived notions, always enchanting and always leaving you wanting more.
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