Ragna Róbertsdóttir

Ragna Róbertsdóttir is an Icelandic artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the seasonal cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration through delicate, often ephemeral materials. Her work reflects on impermanence, crafting a visual language of slow unfolding, blossoming, withering, transforming, that speaks to nature’s quiet endurance. By working with materials like lava rock, turf, salt, and clay, Róbertsdóttir transforms geological processes into poetic gestures. Her compositions appear simple, yet they demand prolonged contemplation. 

Ragna Róbertsdóttir’s minimalist sculptures and outdoor interventions Timescape, Saltscape, and Path are rooted in Iceland’s elemental materiality, evoking the slow erosion, formation, and sedimentation of the land itself. Each granule or fragment seems suspended in geological memory, marking the passage of millennia in a single crystalline gesture. These works operate as slow clocks, capturing the sediment of centuries and positioning nature not as a backdrop to human life, but as its measure and mirror. At the entrance of the Nordic House, copper plates are embedded into the ground, quietly catching light and weather over time, marking thresholds and inviting a slowed, attentive mode of arrival. She similarly marks a pathway in the marsh of Nordic House with fragments of red lava, stone, and sediment, creating a tactile and visual disruption that amplifies the terrain’s geological memory.