The morning I visit Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir in Preston, I sit opposite her as she traces lines into square copper tiles. 15x15cm, many of them are laid out flat across the table as one big shiny sheet. Friðbjörnsdóttir is transferring her line drawing into a wax ground on each tile using tracing paper, and all the time we talk with research fellow Tracy Hill and research technician Kathryn Poole, working with her on the residency. They are moving in and out, collecting and replacing copper tiles as they take them away for the next steps in the etching process. The Women in Print residency takes place inside the cavernous but pleasingly cluttered print studios at University of Lancashire (previously University of Central Lancashire), and we can see glimpses of a very bright January day outside. All the light in the room is bouncing off the copper squares in front of us. At this point in the process many of them are so polished that I can see her reflection in them as we speak.
The big image that she is tracing over and into the copper shows two-winged figures she has based on images from ancient Greek pottery. She shows me photos of the original urns, and you can see that her versions are faithful in the style and content but with additions and far more interest in playful movement – the draping clothes sweep more dramatically and the energy that runs down poised hands and over delicate feathers is sharper. She talks right from the start about how this is one of the new challenges for her on this residency, drawing out this huge picture and then tracing and transferring it onto the copper tiles. She says her reference images were chosen mostly because the high contrast of the line drawings will translate well into print, but she is interested in their complicated references too, what information they bring with them through the ages. They depict Nike, the winged goddess of victory, in two slightly different styles from different eras and pieces of ancient pottery.
In Friðbjörnsdóttir’s big final drawing they are playing together. One is carrying a twisting ribbon, the other a kind of ball. When I visit her there are only two, but by the time the exhibition is hung in late March she will have added a third. Many of the decisions that make up the final exhibition will be worked out during her time at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios (ACPS) – she has barely gestured at many of the fine details on her original drawing so that, as we speak, she is having to invent details that, once traced onto the copper, cannot be undone.
We laugh a lot as she works. Friðbjörnsdóttir is eloquent and charming, her conversation ranging from her own work to the problems she sees in the world and horrors we are all witnessing in real time. Her hands keep moving and she does not stop working all morning; this is going to be a long process and she is already running behind. She keeps saying, ‘it is always stupid to leave things to be decided on later,’ as she gets to sections that she has not quite finalized.
The materials demand certain changes as Friðbjörnsdóttir works with them, as do the images. It’s more important to her that each individual plate be visually coherent and interesting than remain faithful to the original reference images, so she shifts and adds flowers, leaves, small images of balls rolling across a checked floor reminiscent of a chess game. The references to play and strategic games are important – play as kind of communication between participants, but also as a creative pursuit where the desire is for a good game, rather than for a winner and loser.
Friðbjörnsdóttir is an Icelandic artist who has worked with many different materials, changing her medium to suit the work rather than working in one form for any length of time. Her art is always concerned with manifold layers of interlocking reference and connection between the kinds of material she works with and the ideas around communication and movement that she is exploring. There is almost always some kind of light in her work, sometimes as information and sometimes as transmission technology, and sometimes appearing in the spaces between objects or as navigation and direction. ECHO LIMA which she is working on during her time at ACPS feels full of these same reflections and illuminations and, even in its construction phase in the studio, full of a tangible material desire. The images of Nike she is working on, which date back to around 400 BCE, are a complicated kind of reference: the repetition of the figure mirrors the repetitive nature of the work as a whole.
There are traces of these concerns with repetition and earlier experiments with printing processes in previous works. Amongst many other exhibitions Erindi/Serenade at Hafnarborg Centre of Culture and Fine Art in 2017 in Iceland worked with images and ideas of migratory birds blown off course. She was thinking about what these birds brought with them and how they ended up in the ‘wrong’ places, carrying complex ideas and themselves into new contexts. These birds that navigated the skies at night were displayed in blue as cyanotypes on the walls but also ‘in-person’ as little dead bodies in vitrines lit by blue/purple Xenon light. The attention in this exhibition was with local histories and materials but also with different ways of carrying information through time. The exhibition’s exploration of sound, light and the tension between the natural world and human constructs won her a nomination for the Icelandic Art Prize in 2018.
Her 2020 project QRF (Where are you bound from?) / QRD (Where are you bound for?) used Morse code, which slowly becomes apparent to me, is central to ECHO LIMA too. QRF (Where are you bound from?) / QRD (Where are you bound for?) was written in flowering bedding plants to reference the history of burial sites in the Grafarvogur area, exploring ideas of memory and transformation through thinking about life cycles. Repetition and iteration thread themselves through all her work – in this project, she connected the past with the present by using plants to encode messages and links to local history. Her installations are often temporary, sometimes even perishable. She is interested in the transient nature of things and ideas, and the evolving, moving, often repetitive nature of relationships humans have with their environments.
In ECHO LIMA Friðbjörnsdóttir is using copper’s inherent non-perishable qualities to think about the irreversible nature of change – the copper will outlast paper or drawings; she wants to make something solid and permanent. The piece is filled with iterative rhythms, from how it is made (the drawing has to be repeated four times before it is finally etched into the copper) to what it shows. And one of the things that will never been seen in the final work is the complete image. Friðbjörnsdóttir and her research team, and me, might be the only people to see the image all together like this: the tiles are going to be broken up so that the Nikes are entirely deconstructed. Her associations with both triumph and sacrifice will be present but also scattered. Nike brings laurels and plaques to the victors in war and games and her presence in Friðbjörnsdóttir’s work is a reminder of the impulse to win, to overcome obstacles, but more to persist. The dangers of the urge to fight and win, regardless of the cost, comes up again and again in our conversations. Friðbjörnsdóttir is horrified by what the urge to win and claim victory over land or resources is doing in the world right now.
This interplay of victory and loss, of effort and consequence, is part of what Friðbjörnsdóttir is thinking about with ECHO LIMA. The work contains direct messages, but then deliberately gets in its own way, so that reading them or seeing them becomes almost impossible. It insists on the futility of victory. Our conversation ranges across any number of subjects, but we touch often on the horror of ongoing violence in Palestine and the difficulty of the discourse of victory. ‘What does winning even mean in a war?’ she wonders. She is interested in Nike as an early visual reference for angels – how Nike filters through art as Europe shifts towards Christianity. She has been translated and transmuted and now she presides over graves and altars. Friðbjörnsdóttir etching these images into copper, a material used to convey information via electricity lines but also old printing presses, suggests our efforts to communicate across time and space as both fraught and fragile. Thinking about Nike as a symbol of victory in this context seems almost ironic. Victory, here, is not about overcoming a physical enemy but about the persistence of meaning across time, the continued attempt to transmit urgent signals without the certainty that they will be seen or understood.
In the studio, the copper plates, shiny and reflective, seem to almost speak back to us as they catch light, their surfaces demanding attention and respect. They don’t just hold the marks left on them, they suggest something about how our actions affect the world around us. It is this tension between actions and their consequences that occupies Friðbjörnsdóttir. Each shiny plate is covered with a hard ground of wax and then the images are traced into the wax before the plate is carefully dipped into a vertical tank of ferric oxide. The plates are submerged for an exact amount of time while the ferric oxide etches into the unprotected lines and little sediments of copper float down to the bottom of the tank. They are then cleaned back to a polished gleam before the aquatint is applied. The aquatint allows large sections of the plates to be textured so that, if printed, there will be solid sections of inked page. Right now, there is no real plan to print out the image again, the work will be these beautiful, demanding copper spares – not a print, but the images on the copper plates, which also hold within them the possibility of duplicating or printing It is hard work that takes the help of the whole research team across the residency, who work constantly in the background of our conversation, lifting shining squares in and out of tubs, greasing them, cleaning them, polishing them and returning them to table where Friðbjörnsdóttir is working.
It is hard to describe how permanent each action taken in the studio feels. The treated plates take and hold the slightest mark and the process is laborious and cannot be started again – even her sleeve as she talks leaves scratches; every line she draws becomes permanent and cannot be erased. Friðbjörnsdóttir is constantly concerned with the unforgiving nature of the copper etching and printing process.
One of the important research elements of the residency concerns the decisions about how ‘dark’ or ‘light’ each section of the etchings are – it takes me some time to wrap my head around how important the printed effect is to Friðbjörnsdóttir, given that prints are not at all intended as the finished product of this process. The contrast between the dark and light she talks about will be apparent in how textured and smooth copper tiles are, but this contrast is far subtler on the copper than it is in the prints or in the reference images of Nike from the pottery. This commitment to precision, to the idea of a print that may not come to fruition, feels strange. It feels somehow about the fragility of communication, the difficulty of transmitting meaning across time and space, and the permanence of actions once made. This is an insistence on a fragmented nature of communication, where meaning can often be lost or misinterpreted, even when the message is clear.
Friðbjörnsdóttir says that in many ways it is ‘the material that controls what can and cannot happen’. She wants to use the materials as traditionally and precisely as possible. Partly I think because the material seems to ask for it, she is primarily interested in the copper. Not paper, or ink. But a material that can hold the information she is etching into it far more robustly and luminously than paper. But even that is complicated for her – the copper feels more permanent but she knows that printing makes ideas and images easier to disseminate. A different kind of communication and permanence is scarified by not printing anything.
Friðbjörnsdóttir was born in 1973 in Reykjavík, Iceland, and studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (1993-1995), London Guildhall University, and completed her MA in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2004 and lived in England for nearly ten years, so she is not a stranger here. But as she works, we talk about feeling strange in England, and like strangers in a world that is very difficult to comprehend right now and about how difficult it is to be understood. What kinds of communication we sacrifice by traveling and being out of place.
The title of the exhibition, ECHO LIMA, comes from the International Code of Signals, a system used primarily by ships at sea to communicate distress and other messages. The signal ‘Echo Lima’ means ‘Repeat the Distress Position’, and it is so easy to imagine a ship out at sea, knowing that there is another ship floundering in the dark but not knowing where it is.
In the gallery, once installed, the copper plates will be arranged along the walls in one long line, spelling out this distress message in Morse Code. Dot – one plate – dash – three touching. Dot dash dash dot. Morse code is a medium that historically has been used to convey urgency and important information at war and at sea and over vast distances. The ninety-five plates will form a long irregular chain around the room, each grouping a section of the message and a deconstruction of the images of victory. The Nikes will be broken up and scattered around to make the morse code so that there is no possibility in the final work of seeing them whole, or even seeing what they are. In Preston, Friðbjörnsdóttir talks as she works on them about how important it is that each plate be interesting, even if there is no clear way of discerning what that plate depicts. Its deconstruction makes it abstract. This deconstruction is one that takes apart meaning but also, for Friðbjörnsdóttir, creates infinite possibilities of combination.
The second element of ECHO LIMA will take form on the gallery floor. A series of plaster cubes, each the exact dimensions of the copper plates, will carry plaster cast intaglio prints, creating a visual echo between the matte cubes below and the shining copper on the walls. Scattered among them will be small copper balls which, even in our conversation, seem irresistibly tactile, playful, and demanding to be touched, even before they are physically present.
We talk a lot about these copper objects: their weight, their cost, their allure. They will suggest a half-played game or something abandoned – a message never received – but they are also about desire. The dialogue between flat etched plates and solid sculptural forms creates a tension between abstract communication and physical wanting, carrying the same unease that runs through all Friðbjörnsdóttir’s work: how to speak about irreversible change, and how to keep trying. And all the time we talk, the copper is glittery, bouncing light around, and demanding both attention and space. It is so shiny.
Friðbjörnsdóttir’s interest in the transmission of messages extends through and from the technical aspects of her medium to the impossibility of communication and the endless vital attempts at it. There is a sense in which ECHO LIMA is running on the energy of the persistence of attempting meaning, of keeping trying. It’s about the need to keep repeating the message, even when it seems like no one is listening. But it is also very hard to reach. In ECHO LIMA, Friðbjörnsdóttir challenges us to reflect on the nature of communication, the fragility of our actions, and the urgency of the messages we need to hear before it’s too late. Through the persistent repetition of distress signals, echoing shapes and dimensions and deconstructed representations, the work considers the potential cost of such actions whilst also making room for very material desires.
This exploration was informed by conversations with Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir, part of a series of written responses to the Women in Print artist residencies at Artlab Contemporary Printmaking Studio, University of Lancashire, Preston. www.artlabcontemporaryprint.org.uk
Final outcomes of ECHO LIMA at Berg Contemporary, Reykjavik, can be seen at the artist’s website: https://www.annajuliaf.com/echolima
Tessa Harris is a writer and poet from Namibia, currently living in North Manchester.
This exploration is supported by University of Lancashire.
Published 04.02.2026 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
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