Drawing's Alterity

This chapter explores the artistic practice of Icelandic artist Steingrímur Eyfjörð. His work weaves together the role of the artist with folk mythology, both from his native Iceland and further afield, to facilitate a form of cultural commentary that occupies the interstices between a naïve realism and the caricaturing of myths and history. Focusing on the relationship between drawing and alterity in particular, this chapter asks how drawing acts as a means of portraying an authentic unmediated voice, a witness to cultural alterity, which in the case of Eyfjörð is supported by the use of an ‘unskilled’ style of direct expression that debunks traditional idioms of draughtsmanship