HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

Sculptural installation with 450 textile puffin teddies, each approx. 12 × 6 × 5 cm, irregularly shaped heap, dimensions variable (2019).

The Thinking as a Mountain sculpture was created as part of a larger installation All is Full of Love curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2019. In his curatorial text he wrote: ‘‘.. Connecting the three most important industries in Icelandic modern times the artist positioned herself as the evolving figure of the artist as a puffin while underlining the manual labour that prevails, in spite of shifting class structures´´

As part of the exhibition Ann-Sofie Gremaud, associate professor at University of Iceland, held a seminar based on theories she examined in her PhD thesis and that can shed a light on the Artist as a Puffin work. In her essay she claims that “norientalist” stereotypes can be viewed as a process of European-colonial reciprocal identity formation by referring to Hegel who has argued how identity processes rely heavily on mutual confirmation: The center needs to define a periphery (an “other”) in order to define itself. To Gremaud Iceland has played a vital role as “the other place”, where explosive natural power has been juxtaposed to the long history of European culture. Historical colonial association with the natural state has led to Icelanders being perceived as more original, authentic, unspoiled or even uncivilized and barbaric. Reactions to that perception have sometimes included its rejection, whilst at others, embraced it and so been complicit in self-exoticisation.

In 2025 Distanz Verlag published a monograph on the Keep Frozen research project titled Rhythm of Labor. On the occassion Katla Kjartandsdottir, then PhD candidate in Cultural Studies and sessional teacher at the University of Iceland, was commissioned to write an essay about The Artist as a Puffin. The text approaches the series through the exhibition All is Full of Love.

The German art critic Julia Gwendolyn Schneider, the editor of the monograph, introduced Kjartansdottir essay with these words: ‘‘As early as 2006, when puffins were far from being the ultimate tourism symbol in Iceland, Guðnadóttir sensed a paradigm shift in the bird’s significance and began developing a performative persona. Kjartansdóttir unpacks how the “small, cute, and cuddly” image of the puffin is creatively deconstructed. She contextualizes the puffin works in relation to the cultural and socio-economic developments in Iceland at the time they were created and updates their meaning by illuminating the puffin’s role as a harbinger of potentially grim ecological messages.’

Kjartansdottir text reads ´´Another sculpture is Thinking Like a Mountain. Thinking Like a Mall (2019) comprised of 450 puffin teddies lying in a heap on a wooden table next to Puffin Shop. The second half of the work’s title is borrowed from the book Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (2016) written by Steven Vogel, who argues provocatively that environmental philosophy, in its ethics, should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial. By directly confronting puffin imagery as a mass-produced tourist keepsake and tangible symbol of contemporary Icelandic cultural identity, the sculptures delved deeper into issues surrounding the commodification of ethnic and cultural identities associated with the massive growth of the tourism industry in Iceland and beyond…´´

The full essay can be read on the page about the Puffin Shop.