“In many ways, I’m profoundly uninterested in architecture,” says Katrin Sigurdardottir — a surprising statement from an artist whose work would seem to be intimately linked to architectural traditions. For instance, "Boiseries," Sigurdardottir’s project at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010, included reproductions of two of the museum’s French 18th-century period rooms: one from the Hôtel de Crillon and the other from the Hôtel de Cabris. Sigurdardottir constructed renditions of the two rooms on a scale that was 85 percent of the originals: a proportion almost the right size, only slightly off — making for an uncomfortable experience when walking into them. Her rooms were completely whitewashed. The elaborate embellishments in gold and paint became white patterns, the lush furniture turned ghosts of stuff past. Surprisingly enough, however, the result did not look like a stripped-down version of an original: It was some-
thing entirely new. Her rooms take their cue from the French interiors, but they also allude to history and the way we as a society build structures, use them, and then revel in conserving them. “It’s not the questions of architecture that I am interested in,” she clarifies. “I use architecture as a language to describe places, places with history, containers for experiences. Architecture programs experiences in the sense that it becomes a kind of script for how to live or how to exist, how to perform your daily life in
space — but it also just becomes the stage where things take place.”

What does it mean to break down a building to its essence? There’s something about Sigurdardottir’s work that is very immediate — her pieces are visually gorgeous — but they are also suggestive in an elusive way. They evoke a play of associations, on what is and isn’t palpable or what remains unsaid. And paradoxically, she creates immersive environments but then allows the audience limited access to them. For "Untitled," 2009, 
an installation at Eleven Rivington, her New York gallery, she created a box of medium-density fiberboard that housed a 
small replica of a watchtower visible through a window only by means of an assortment of two-way mirrors that offered myriad reflections, but never a direct view of the actual thing. Her 
most recent New York installation, "Stage," 2012, a miniature model of a theater, was displayed in Art in General’s storefront window. Echoing the fact that a theater’s stage is seen from 
the front, Sigurdardottir’s sculpture was suspended from the
ceiling and could be viewed only from the street. And "High Plane," 2001–07, a large white platform with an imaginary landscape 
of a mountain range sculpted on it, is set on trusses 13 feet above 
its exhibition spaces, reachable by ladders leading to small holes in the platform through which the viewers can poke their heads.

Usually made of cheap materials — plywood, plaster, resin, and so forth — Sigurdardottir’s works are largely handmade. Her Long Island City studio has very little furniture in it: a number 
of desks and tables with works in progress scattered on them 
and a small sitting area by a large window, including a beautiful, simple bench made of wood with thick fabric stretched vertically and horizontally across it. When I comment on it, her eyes light up: “That is my divan. It’s where I make my most important decisions. I built it out of leftover wood I had in the studio and fabric I bought in Berlin.” Furniture may not be art, but building it is part of Sigurdardottir’s experimentation with materials, which she defines as a crucial element of her work, especially because she did not study sculpture. “I was trained as a painter and a filmmaker, actually. So I have this obsession with doing 
as much as I can with my own hands,” she says. “If a drawing were not made by the artist’s hand, you would question its authenticity. There is something in that personally handmade quality that I often choose. Therefore I might opt to do something myself, even if I could hand it over to someone else to do it. I’m kind of an old-fashioned sculptor in that way.”