Are they expecting us? Borghildur Oskarsdottir pays homage to her family history.

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THE STARTING POINT OF MY EXHIBITION Are They Expecting Us? is my father's family history dating back to the beginning of the 20th century and the family's genealogy. I travelled around with a camera visiting the places where my father's family and their ancestors lived in the South of Iceland. Later I began to consider the possibility of linking the family's stories to a piece of art or at any rate to attempt to forge a link between the narratives and visual art. The result was a work where I brought together my family history, narratives and photos, my diary and my ceramic bowls and also the Orion constellation.

The family history is the core of the work; images printed on large cards, open-faced books, branching out across the floor. I chose to call these objects Spreads. On the right hand side of each spread the story is told, the story of my family. Genealogical lines are also traced back to the 18th century. On the left hand side of the Spreads there are pictures of places were these people lived, photos of the places as they look today; overgrown ruins of remote long deserted houses, small village houses, pictures of rural scenery, mountains, rivers, lakes and town buildings.

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On 10 November 2007 the Hveragerdi Museum's curator informed me that my exhibition had been accepted to be in their gallery the next year. From that moment I started to write a diary and I wrote down my story over the four months that I was preparing the exhibition. This is my endeavour to pick up the thread and identify with the time of my ancestors.

When I started to write down my diary, a month had passed since my father had died and a few withering flowers from the funeral lingered in their vases. My father was the oldest of seven siblings but the last one to die. He had told me his remembrance of the trip when his parents, with five children, were trans-located in the spring of 1918, from the village where their home had been dismantled, to the Floi district. That was the very beginning of my interest in the family story.

My diary is printed in small reddish-brown letters on size A5 paper, one day on each sheet. I attached the sheets of papers onto the wall with bits of tape, the sheets close together so as to form one horizontal organic line of text through all of the sheets. The reddish-brown line of text appears like an organic image, a distant landscape.

Working on the ceramic bowls has long been part of my profession, hand-moulded utilitarian objects made of white clay with pale bluish-green glossy glaze. The bowls vary in shape and size but they all bear my fingerprints. They serve a useful purpose whether their content is abstract or concrete, their usefulness taking precedence. At the exhibition I arrange the bowls in stacks of different heights.

The bowls on the floor and my long diary line on the wall is a single entity within the work. But Orion, a sketch on the wall, a constellation in the shape of a human being, alien and mysterious, an ancient legendary hero, is far removed from my small family world but joined the bowls in the pale bluish-green colour.

Borghildir Oskarsdottir is an artist who lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland.