Sistory

Manifesto
We are Sistory - We tell stories

We the 2 members of Sistory strive to:

Remember and Refresh
Create and Recreate
Tell and Retell
Unveil and Reveal
Ignite and Alight
Memorize and Harmonize

In the year 2010 we sisters Sara and Svanhildur Vilbergsdætur began painting together. It was a total coincidence and nothing we had ever planned because we are very different and until that time not that connected. The initaitve did not come from us because we were asked to do a part of a painting representing our native place in the western part of Iceland for Reykjavik Cultural night in august 2010. We surprised ourselves when we found out that this was something meant to be. So we stopped doing our own art and started this joint venture or adventure or we should we say artventure which is different from the art and the creative work we did before. We see ourselves as sisters that tell stories, we have gradually been able to form a new identity for this new way of working and this identity we have given the name Sistory. Sistory because we found out, by working and thinking together, that our main goal and intentions is to tell stories. Stories af ourselves in cultural context and in connections with other people, literature and art history at some point in time.
Our collaboration evolved quickly into something that we had never dreamt of, it gave us new or renewed energy and a refreshing perspective into our work and our life stories. By and through this new way of working we carved a space for our creative thinking and working. A space that also gave us a totally new vison into art history, literature and our own life as humans working as artists. We began to experience something new and experimenting with new way of expressing ourself as one person in our shared narratives on canvas. These narratives are based or grounded in our daily life and collective experiences we share with the rest of the world. We throw garden parties, we own cats, we watch soap operas and read self-help books, we pamper our children.
Our main goal or the core of our work is to reveal the mundane or the trivial things and activities of daily life. We try to throw a new light upon our daily life in a new mirror pointed at ourselves and our fellow humans. We aim to create something new or cast a fresh illuminating light on the trivial things. Revealing and creating something new from our simple existence where we work from our personal space into the public, from the personal to the common experience.
The main feature that marks us a place and seperates us from other artists is the fact that we work together as one person. Our ground rule is that we both have to be on site at the same time working on the canvas, making sketches and casting our ideas to and fro. We only have one rule, we paint ourselves and then the other sister can be absent. Though we have different styles, there is a certain fusion or interaction that might be called the third voice or the third sets of hands, mind and thougths where 1+1 is more than 2. We work all the paintings together from A to Z and, although we differ a lot in technique and style, we fall in the same rhythm and tempo when we paint, much to our surprise at first. When we started in 2010 It was almost as we felt the presence of a third person in the room, a creative element we had never found before. Now we are trying to cultivate and foster this new kind of creativity which we rightfully have named Sistory.  
We think that our roots and origin, being Icelanders coming from a rural remote place in the western part of the country gives our creativity a boost and also gives us a longing to come out into the big world. We were born and raised in a place where the absence of sun in the winter time plays a big role, we lived in a home where creativity played a big role because of an absence of tv and other means of recreation and entertainment were limited. We were also raised in an environment based on stories and our artistic engagement and creativity derives from our roots and that is something that we are proud of and at the same time we want to share it with others.
What drives us ahead in our work is our extreme need for expression and communication because we strongly believe that our stories and our world has a global connection or can reach a global core to both adults and children. We think our stories and how we present them has a profound common harmony with others artistically and we strive for our work to be shown in global context.