20 June – Sunday 19 July 2015
Open daily
Free
Viking Wirral exhibition will be on show at the Williamson in Birkenhead. Sylvia is a poet, painter, music maker, and author (her novel “See out the Crazy Times” was recently published). She first visited Iceland in 2009 and was blown over (once quite literally) by the cold, empty, dangerous and extraordinary landscape. She has been drawn back many times since. Part of her fascination with the country is the tangible link with Viking Wirral, a shared common heritage where the people of Wirral spoke Old Norse, the same language as the Icelanders. The exhibition combines nearly sixty paintings, many created especially for this event, plus poetry and a short DVD she made after flying over the erupting volcano Eyjafjallajokull in a tiny Cessna airplane. She is the director of the Liverpool International Nordic Centre.
Sylvia writes: ‘Painting, writing, poetry is one way I respond to the world around me. Listen. Look. Feel. Nature is at the heart of all abstraction. When I stare out into the Mersey Estuary I can still see those wild expanses of ice, fire, mountain, sea, and a sky full of dancing Northern Lights.’