How Björk Turned Collaboration Into an Art Form

Björk may not deem herself a visual artist, but she is undeniably a visionary. More than three decades’ worth of boundary-smashing music and radical image-making have signaled her ambitions beyond the limits of song. Now, a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland is unpacking that visual world, while surfacing the collaborative magic that powers it.

“Echolalia” sprawls across three rooms at the institution, presenting a video installation, a choral work, and an audio-visual experience masterminded by the Icelandic icon. While staged at immersive scales, the pieces are not without deep emotional resonance. Sorrowful Soil (2022), for one, unfolds in a chapel-like atmosphere accompanied by the titular track Björk wrote after the death of her mother. In the vein of Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet (2001), 30 speakers encircling the space emit the individual voices of the Hamrahlíð Choir—mournful alone, yet transcendent together.

“Sound is such an important experience to have in art,” the museum’s chief curator Pari Stave told me when I visited the show. “To see these videos in this immersive environment with optimized listening is another level of experience.”

Beyond the Screen

While Ancestress (2022) is a video you can view on YouTube, experiencing it as a massive projection in a darkened room more so captures the work’s cinematic scope. The video for the song, another poignant tribute by Björk to her late mother, follows a colorful funeral procession as it dances its way through a valley outside Jórukleif in Iceland. It culminates in a craggy setting, with Björk cradling one of the procession members, Pieta-style.

Notably, the work underscores how Björk’s singular vision is not built alone, but with the help of creatives who she has tapped and nurtured over the years. Among the many collaborators on Ancestress are director Andrew Thomas Huang, who has overseen several of the singer’s videos, and artist James Merry, whose masks have adorned Björk’s face for almost a decade. Merry’s creations for the video, which he co-creative-directed, are on view in the same space.

Over in another room is her new work Nerve Bloom (2026), created with Polish painter Natalia Kleszczewska and London-based digital artist Natalie Liu. The installation features two-sided LED screens and a projection, depicting animated faces, bodies, and landscapes that can be viewed alone or in alignment. In a statement, Björk described how Liu designed the CGI elements based on Kleszczewska’s tender paintings, “finding ways for the digital to sit organically alongside Natalia’s world.”

“My role in it was a creative director, bringing in the singer-songwriter tradition, where emotionally precise things happen inside the structure of a song,” Björk added. “I guided color palettes, textures, and the environments the music happens in.”

It’s a relationship that is not just “work for hire,” Stave said. “They’re working together to visualize the world-building. Not a lot of musicians do that.”

The Mask Maker

One collaborator who can attest to a rich partnership with Björk is Merry. The U.K.-born, Reykjavik-based artist’s retrospective, “Metamorphlings,” is also running at the National Gallery of Iceland. In fact, according to Stave, the museum had initially only planned the show of Merry’s oeuvre, until Björk offered her contribution in support of his work.

Indeed, the pair’s paths are so intertwined that he’s regularly referred to as Björk’s mask-maker. The truth, Merry explained during a tour of his exhibition, is less calculated than that. From 2009, he served as the musician’s research assistant, collating references and ideas that would be useful for her projects. “I was working with her very intensely for six years before I even made a mask,” he said.

That first work, titled Family from 2014, is less a mask than a frame for the face—a hood of dark lilac latex embroidered with neon yellow vines, colors borrowed from the palette for Björk’s 2015 album Vulnicura. Merry gifted the piece to Björk on her birthday; she liked it so much that she asked for more. 

Merry delivered. Over the years, he has crafted ever-more elaborate masks for the singer to don on album covers, in videos, and on tour, now collected at “Metamorphlings.” All feature his supremely imaginative embroidery, whether with thread or wire, forming strange organic forms—plant stems contouring the face, clots of pearls resembling coral, eel-shaped metallic strips coiling inward and out. Some masks are heavy with pleated tulle or curled latex, as in the jellyfish-like design for her “Notget” video. Others are experimental, such as the alien silicon masks Björk wore for Utopia (2017). 

But the mask is not Merry’s canvas; the human face is. “I’ve always been really fascinated with the face. I love the fact that you can mess with it so easily,” he said, adding of his masks: “They’re rarely like a flat identity. They’re more permeable, made to look like they’re growing out of a head or face.”

However intricate these masks appear, Merry revealed he seldom sketches his designs beforehand, preferring to work directly with the material. What’s more, his masks are often last-minute creations. He recalled pressing the pleats into a mask at an Airbnb rental in Berlin, coiling red wire on his own face in a hotel bathroom in Japan, and embroidering another mask in a car on the way to a venue. “I was often finishing them as they were going on Björk’s head on the side of the stage,” he said.

It has also helped that Merry and Björk have developed a partnership founded on shared sensibilities. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, they discussed bonding over everything from nature and technology to ecology and ancient ritual. This “mutual meeting,” in Merry’s words, has fostered an unspoken shorthand, one that allows him to intuit what Björk is looking for visually with each new project.

“It’s never explicit,” he said of their collaborative process. “It was often when there was like an element that’s missing from an album or something very specific that I could tell she was looking for. That’s what the masks are, actually—they’re filling in the gaps of these worlds she’s building. I’ll just disappear into my room to try and make it.”

Growing Forms

The retrospective, then, offered Merry the opportunity to step outside that room and truly assess his decade-long practice. Only when cataloguing his work for the first time in 2020, for instance, did he discover the scale of his output: not the 20 or 30 masks he imagined, but 80 distinct designs.

He also managed to tease out recurring themes in his oeuvre, grouping them into five archetypes—Ghost Orchid, the Medusa, Björchid, the Moth, and the Stingray. “I’m not even particularly interested in stingrays,” he said. “It just comes.” In the exhibition are five metallic masks he’s created to represent these motifs, which he called “the final bosses of the family trees.”

Merry’s practice continues branching out, too. The show features two masks he created for Tilda Swinton, which she wore to the Venice Film Festival in 2020. Inspired by marine organisms, they are his rare designs that cover the whole face. Around the corner from them are his newest masks, which take visual cues from Iron Age artifacts. One exquisite brass mask—Atenovx (2026), studded with red onyx and pearls—is a functioning solar calendar. 

The picture that emerges here is of an artist discovering and elaborating on his craft in real time. Merry talks excitedly of techniques he wants to explore—bronze-casting, perhaps, or silversmithing—and his research into Romano-Celtic Britain, his latest obsession. (One thing he’s not considering? Mass production.) In the same way his working relationship with Björk has evolved, his growth as a craftsman feels instinctive, guided by curiosity more than a master plan.

It’s an approach encapsulated by the “strange game” Merry plays when creating one of his metallic masks. Rather than joining two shapes together, he insists on hand-cutting each form wholly from one single 12-by-12-inch sheet. It’s a process that takes months of planning to figure out how the continuous shape could fold or bend in on itself. Why the effort?

“It feels more organic to me,” he explained.” As soon as you glue two things together, it’s like a human has intervened. But when they’re all just one piece, it feels like something that could have grown in nature.”

“Björk: Echolalia” is on view through September 19 at the National Gallery of Iceland, Fríkirkjuvegur 7, Reykjavík, Iceland. “James Merry: Metamorphlings” is on view through October 17.