Petra

Multimedia body of work including video, photography, foam, 2017 - 2018

In the summer of 2017 I spent the month of May in the Eastern Fjord town of Stöðvarfjörður Iceland working with the descendants of Ljósbjörg Petra María at her home museum Steinasafn Petra. The museum contains a collection of thousands of precious stones and gems collected by Petra during a lifetime of expeditions up and down the fjord mountain-scape. Though Petra passed away in 2012, the museum is maintained by 4 generations after her. Unnur, her granddaughter who was running the museum that summer graciously gave me free-reign to borrow and document stones from their collection.

The body of work I created includes, portraits, two video works including the stories of Petra’s descendants, a series of photographs, and a performative personal journey to return new found stones back to the Fjord.

This, like much of my work, is an attempt to use all my tools at hand - body, its movements, physical material, attention - to connect with something or someone, otherwise out of reach. In this case, I followed Petra’s footsteps, touched the same stones as she, and spent hours with her family, in order to better understand the determined, constant, and allusive life she led.