Born in Farmington, New Mexico, in 1948, Björk has returned to nearby Chaco Canyon – a site of significance for the indigenous Chaco Culture between 850 and 1250 C.E., and one of the largest and most sophisticated pre-Columbian complexes in North America – repeatedly over the last five decades. Rendered in earthy, vivid colour, the forms in Björk’s paintings take this canyon as a point of departure, evoking brilliant, blazing sunlight, extreme temperatures, and the surreality of traversing an unforgiving landscape which, nonetheless, teems with life. 

In the late 1970s Björk enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts programme at the University of New Mexico. This became an important gathering-place for artists seeking to develop their work by engaging with the New Mexico desert, including local artists Raymond Johnson and Richard Diebenkorn, as well as Björk’s contemporaries Emmi Whitehorse and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who were simultaneously adopting abstraction as a strategy to communicate indigeneity and a sense of place. Björk was profoundly influenced by her time there, and perhaps most significantly so by her fellow UNM alum and lecturer Agnes Martin's practice of transcendental non-thinking; not thought, and not the effort to suppress thought, but something prior to or beneath both. 

Like shadows of shadows, Björk’s painterly marks transmute and reform themselves within a single composition. In one work, a rust-red form leaps and multiplies into a many-limbed echo of itself, rendered in velvety blue-black; in another, a small, slipper-pink curl sits adjacent to a sweeping arch made up of linked, mineral-coloured shapes. These associative, gestural expressions – of climate, touch, sudden movement, vastness – seek to convey Björk’s experience of moving through the landscape, and the emotional impact of a place as it transforms over time.