Alumni Profile
Gunnhildur Johnsdottir
Class of 2007: MFABio
Over the past year, I purposely experimented and delved into new zones of creativity and academic reading. I pushed myself to try out different ideas and media. However something inside me began to realize that I was moving away from themes and cultural issues directly linked to my past.
Fantasy and Fiction have remained intriguing areas for me. When I was about 12 years old I read the last book I had unread in the children’s section of my town’s library. This was in a small fishing village in the Eastern part of Iceland and even though this wasn’t the largest library in the world it did contain some marvelous secrets. Today I am still curious about the ‘possible worlds’ created by fiction, and how they interact with what we call reality. I am interested particularly in true stories that sound like fiction. These stories can derive from personal experiences of individuals, historical facts, scientific research or folklore.
Through focusing on these issues I get closer to understanding the world that we live in and how the reality we take for granted as fact is often just as much ‘created’ as what we think of as the not real.
Being a native of a country like Iceland provides one with unique experiences – one can have rich urban enrichment as well as a unique rural one. My experience of hiking in the Icelandic highlands has influenced how I perceive the world around me. It is in particular the feeling I get from being in the desert, in the vast open space with subdued colors and undulating horizon. The lack of sensory input is something I find very stimulating, as if the nothingness of the space leaves enough room for real thought, imagination and contact. I can only hope to achieve something similar through my art.
I have created work in a variety of mediums, depending on my subject matter at each time. In my work with controlled environments I have focused on the entrance to the work as a threshold. This adds to a feeling for a different place and time in the space. I have also worked with staged photographs and interactive animation and video. Sound has played an important role in my works, although very subdued most of the time. I have a background in classical music that I find influences my imagination more than my actual use of sound. Dreaming and movement through air, such as jumping, swinging and flying are all themes that have interested me. That relates back to my interest in the reality as fiction, since through dreaming we can experience realities that are very real and very fictional at the same time.
Over the past few months I have been involved in writing short narrative in the form of a video. I am interested in exploring the realms of fiction and fact. The story is based on an actual journal of Ina Von Grumbkow, a German woman that was funded by The Royal Prussian Academy of Science in 1908 for an expedition to Iceland to search for her fiancé that had disappeared there on a geological research the year before. I am writing short prose based on my personal experiences from spending time in the desert that merge with the descriptions of Von Grumbkow. My imagery comes from still historical photographs and animated sequences that focus on body movement.
I intend to continue developing this work in the coming months, creating a series of short video works in which a mix of photographs, still video or film shots and animation with narrative voiceover will result. I would like to experiment more with ways of ‘temporal layering’, as I am already doing by showing elements of the video successively that are actually meant to be visually layered. The sound is used as a connecting element. This method of working allows me to merge together in one piece what I before attempted to create in installation, photographs or drawing.
