frá Vármjólk

Rannvá Holm Mortensen’s art studio is crammed with supplies and half-finished creations. On my last visit, drying linocuts hung next to a typecase full of tiny plaster heads secured behind chicken wire, rough model boats, a painting of a fetus in utero, and ominous spikes projecting from a matte black surface. My eye moved from art object to art object, wondering and unable to settle.
 
Mortensen’s multi-media virtuosity—encompassing sculpture, print, paint, sketch, and found materials—is a product of the relentless vision she pursues through mediums. This vision led her to the page in her 2018 debut book Sólsmakkur, which began as a hybrid text and art installation for a gallery. This collection and the follow-up Vármjólk are as much art objects as text. Interwoven with linocut, woodcut, and mixed media collage, both texts—book-length poems—are meant to be experienced visually as much as textually.
 
Reading Mortensen without accompanying art is still a deeply visual experience, so rich is her descriptive language, which she piles up on the page like layers of gesso and oil paint. To read or translate her work—and what is translation but a deep act of reading?—is to enter her vision. In this excerpt from Vármjólk, she paints with science fiction strangeness a world transmogrified by motherhood. “Milk [seeps] from nipples of breastfeeding trees.” Fish with “nipples on their bellies” swim through “new milk seas.” The violence of the capitalist industrial food system is wrought as laboratories and factories turn motherhood into a commodity and “breasts [are] tied down on metal tables.” Alongside the strangeness and violence, there is a deep tenderness to Mortensen’s work. In the swath and sweep of all that motherhood encompasses, the narrator finds a kinship with her ancestors in breastfeeding. She embraces all shapes of breasts and bodies with all their scars and stretch marks.
 
After a bilingual reading with Rannvá at a Tórshavn basement bar, I spoke with a younger Faroese poet who told me how strange it was to hear me read this work on motherhood. We laughed, and then she continued that it was also interesting to hear Rannvá read. To her, Mortensen’s strong Suðuroy accent sounded masculine and forceful. I can’t speak to the former but agree with the forceful quality of her speech. I can still feel the rhythms of that urgent, at times almost strident, voice intoning the Faroese of Vármjólk, the artistic vision flowing through the very sounds of her words.