She once made portraits that were anonymous, universal in their anguish. The subjects ennobled only by their ability to bear the depth of human suffering. Anonymous anguish has given way, Bjork's self-portraits inscribe the growing willingness, necessity, to confront the self. In her series, "Girl," as though beginning (yet) again, she depicts the girl child, the adolescent. Situating herself in a feminine body achingly vulnerable in its promise, she traces the relation of psyche to feminine embodiment.

With her current (self) portraits, Bjork is "trying to say something, to not be silent." Lips open to scream, to sigh, in a repose without resignation, can also be tight, grim, but the eyes continue to look, confronting what the lips shout, whisper, voicelessly. These portraits mark a continued struggle to grasp, to recognize, the embodied self. The painter's gesture becomes body, site of the anguished mind, in the manner of Francis Bacon: quoting Lucien Freud, fleshy matter becomes the grace of embodiment.

The recent death of Bjork's father has been an occasion of grief, mourning, and ultimately of release. Begun six months after her father's death, these portraits interrogate the manner in which the self is knotted in relation with others. In painting the vulnerability, the mutability of flesh and psyche, she pays tribute to the affiliation with her father, and to the memory of the artists, Hannah Wilke and Mary Ann Unger.

The question, "What are the connections between us--how do we reach each other?" continues even after death. Like Pierre Bonnard's elegiac portraits of his wife, these (self) portrait invoke the unexpected and unchanging presence--the trace in the psyche--of those one has loved. Bjork's self-portraits--her father's image shading her own, a family resemblance--bring into relief the porous nature of the boundary between ourselves and others. Haunted by connection to, and separation from others, they are portraits of the self in relationship--however shrouded. Acknowledging the likeness, the family resemblance, Bjork must cross categories of gender and generation. She crosses, a journey that holds the promise of (self) recognition.

The slender girl-child having acknowledged the parent twined with the self, now portrays herself dressed in her "painting shirt," no longer silent. From the promise of the fragile girl-child and a haunted androgyny, to an accepting maturity, she shapes the artist--her faith registered in the treasured blue sky that illuminates these self-portraits.

essay by Flavio Rando, 1999