Ingólfur Arnarsson: ... just a shell. | i8 Grandi

A fossil is a record. Of a life, passed. From organic to inorganic. What remains. The shape of what was. Once. A body. Or the trace of its movement. Set in stone. 

 

A fossil is a memory. A presence of absence. Of a being having been. By chance. Buried and forgotten. In sand or silt or clay. In darkness. And in time, transforming. Sediment building, layers compressing, structures imprinting, tissues dissolving, and rock solidifying - around a perfect negation. Of texture and volume. An exact emptiness. A mould. If the mould is cast, filled with particulates in the slow seep of water, the realisation of what’s missing is only made more tangible. And if biological matter is replaced, molecule for molecule, with mineral, the replica, an apparent cast, will be true throughout. Every detail of what is not there, preserved but concealed, in the density of completeness. 

 

A fossil is a secret. Kept long past its own relevance. Information transferred from the zone of the living to the zone of the non-living. And back. Its meaning is lost in transit and translation, but its very obsolescence is its value. As index. To contexts. Before and After. Ancient whale skeletons appear in the driest desert. Seashells on the highest mountain. Paradox forces logic. When relics of a certain time and place resurface in another time and place, it is the surface itself that has shifted. 

 

Continents collide, mountains rise, winds blow and rains fall, rock weathers into sand and silt and clay. A transient existence, caught in this perpetual cycle, reveals forces at work too big and slow to see in action. And too small and fleeting. A 47 million-year-old moth was found fossilised with such precision that its original colour has been shown to be structural. Made not of pigment, but of light and form. The scattering of wavelengths by ridges on wing scales. The suppression of iridescence by holes in between. A single colour, consistent from all angles, but in effect, two. A camouflage, when at rest against a leaf. A warning, while feeding on a flower.

 

Lani Yamamoto

A mirage is the image of an object, misplaced. A mountain in the sky, as if floating. The sky on the ground, as if water. Cliffs on the water, as if cliffs. A mirage is a deception but not a delusion. A trick of imagination - of too little, not too much.

 

The brain assumes light always travels in straight lines - reflecting the world as, and where, it stands. But only the speed of light is constant. Its behaviour is variable. Light is a wave and/or particle. Depending. Waves travel, spreading and interfering. Particles interact, are scattered and absorbed. Over distance, light can curve. Bending to changes of temperature in the air. Linear thinking doesn’t account for twists and turns. Along presumed lines, the image appears elsewhere. Dislocated from its source and otherwise distorted.

 

Quantum mechanics can’t be expressed in classical terms. At least not with words. Metaphor is its own kind of mirage. (The oasis ahead, the blue of the far off sky.) A mirage occurs most often near the horizon. Low angle light travels farthest to us. The difference in temperatures at the earth’s surface can be vast. If the air nearest the surface is hot and the overlying air cold, light falling from the sky through this gradient is curved upward to us. Because we can only assume sightlines are straight, we see the light coming slant from below, and the image is lower than it should be. Upside down. If temperatures are inverted, the opposite is true. Light is bent down towards us and we see the image higher than it should be. Right side up. (A snowy peak, hovering.) And if vertical and horizontal, hot and cold layers of air happen to be in its path, light from an unknown object can be transformed into otherworldly shapes. Steady or wavering, single or multiple, stretched or compressed. (Bluffs of impossible scale shimmering across the sea.)

 

Explanations can be made in retrospect but a mirage is unpredictable. Given the shifting complexities of light, its atmospheric lens, and our own observational limits, a mirage is at best a fleeting glimpse of what transpires between. Subject and object. The known and unknowable. It is a coincident misalignment.

A wonder. A surprise. A mirage is the image of a moment, passing.

Lani Yamamoto

The horizon is a line. Between earth and sky. What we know and don’t. As far as we can see.

It isn’t real (what line is?) – but real enough to set a bearing by. If at sea. In the dark. Under a single star.

It isn’t there – yet there it is. At a distance. Truest from the shore. Calculable. But assuming a sightline tangent to earth, and holding the earth’s radius constant, we are the biggest variable in our own equation. Our position determines the horizon’s by which we determine ours. Rules bend. The horizon retreats on approach and approaches on retreat. We can’t move closer by moving closer. Along the horizontal, anyway. Along the vertical, a small downward shift changes everything. The closer our eye level is to sea level, the closer the horizon moves towards us. Standing at the water’s edge the horizon is a few kilometres away. In the water, glancing across its surface, the horizon is just within reach.

Still, the horizon can never be reached. In practice or theory. The distance equation works best in a vacuum. The real world has atmosphere. Light bends. Lines curve. Math is limited by its precision. Even with other equations adjusting for refraction factored in, the horizon is always a bit further than where it should be.

The horizon is apparent. Not always. Sometimes. Vanishing in fog. Taking the distance with it. Without it, we are lost. Between foreground and background. Earth and sky. Dead reckoning gets us only so far. Point to point. Adrift. But left to our own devices, a downward spiral can feel like steady, onward progress. With no fixed horizon, the body overcompensates and under-corrects. Mistaking internal balance for external. Disorientation for orientation. Comfort for truth. Despite unwinding directions and falling numbers, attempts at correction feel counter-intuitive. Against this false sensory horizon, it’s the world turning upside down and backwards, not us. As if we weren’t earthbound. As if we could navigate earth as if we weren’t part of it.

The horizon is elusive – and maybe that’s the point. Defined by our position and perspective at a given moment, it is only a temporary, if necessary, landmark of our former limits. Once something appears on the horizon we can imagine another horizon beyond. And every time we lose sight of the horizon we find it again from a new standpoint with a different view of the world.

 

Lani Yamamoto

A cloud is a suspension. Moisture in air, unresolved. Now vapour. Now mist. Now ice. It’s a conditional gathering. Shaped by the unforeseen. Forming and unforming as it drifts. In and out of existence. Between heat and cold. Pressure and vacuum. Movement and stillness. 

 

A cloud hangs in the balance. Of fragile coexistence. Water molecules too small to amass, cling to traces too slight to recall. Ash. Salt. Pollen. Dust. Swept up on the winds and forgotten. The sky is full of lost memories. The seeds of rain and snow. Droplets condense, collide and merge. Crystals deposit and cluster. Accumulation is essential. If a cloud isn’t growing, it’s eroding. Worn down, edges first, by the air around it. If a cloud is growing, it’s expanding. Billowing along the vertical and horizontal. Filling all the volume temperature and humidity will allow. Warm, moist air floats on cool, dry air. It’s a matter of distribution not intuition. A cloud is 99.9% air and hundreds of tons of water. When spread across vast distances, (with each tiny droplet and crystal virtually weightless), a massive, swelling cloud stays aloft on updrafts. But once a single raindrop or snowflake becomes too heavy, it falls right through.

 

A cloud is an illusion. Of sorts. Water and air are transparent. A cloud is unclear. An ambiguous state. The shape of an instant. In a certain light. From an angle. It manifests. Appearing wherever sunlight is scattered by droplets and crystals. The colour of whatever light it receives. A cloud is white because sunlight, containing all colours, scatters evenly back to us as white. A cloud is grey where it is too thick for light to come through. But the sky is only overcast underneath. A cloud is illuminated as it obscures. At sunrise and sunset, the low sunlight travels furthest, air particles scattering most of its colours on the way. Still, even on the greyest cloud, on the thinnest edge, there is always a chance of pink.

 

Lani Yamamoto

Spanning far longer than traditional museum or gallery shows, i8 Grandi’s programming focuses on concepts of space and time. The sustained duration of the annual format allows artists to consider how time affects their work, and the fluidity encourages audiences to revisit the changing installations. Arnarson’s is the fourth yearlong presentation at i8 Grandi, following exhibitions by Ragnar Kjartansson (2025), Andreas Eriksson (2024), B. Ingrid Olson (2023), and Alicja Kwade (2022).