Norns, copper plate etching with aquatint and drypoint on Somerset Velvet paper. Edition of 8. 2024.
Norns is part of an ongoing series of graphic works that artist Wilhelmina Peace has been developing since 2019. The series forms a visual novel loosely inspired by her own life, told through the lens of an intimate and surreal fairy tale.
The narrative follows a fictional girl who finds herself alone one day in a vast and ancient house. As she wanders through its many rooms, she encounters strange beasts and other fantastical figures-phantasmagoric embodiments of the human psyche. Her journey through the house becomes a rite of passage, guiding her from innocence toward deeper self-awareness.
In Norns, Peace imagines what might unfold when the girl enters the living room. Three women huddle on a sofa, their bodies merging into an almost amorphous mass. Their interactions are enigmatic, their relationship ambiguous. Disembodied hands float above them. In the top left corner of the composition, a mysterious, fetal-like shape cloaked in dark mist begins to descend.
Peace envisions these women as the Norns-the Norse trinity of fate, akin to the Greek Fates. These mythic figures spin the thread of life at each person's birth and sever it at death, marking the boundaries of human destiny.
In this depiction, Peace evokes the sacred moment of limitless potential that accompanies every birth. The Norns appear both monolithic and maternal-figures who cradle the seed of life and the shadow of death within their formless embrace.
This piece is a copper plate etching, a process in which the artist creates an image by drawing onto a copper plate and then immersing it in an acid bath to etch the lines and varying depths of tone into the metal.
Wilhelmina Peace is an American artist raised in France, now based in Northern Ireland since 2009. She works from her studio at Vault Artist Studios in Belfast city centre, as well as the Belfast Print Workshop. In 2024, she received the Belfast Print Workshop Graduate Award, the Seacourt Print Workshop Graduate Award, and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair Award. Her work has been exhibited across Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States.