Seven Hikes in Austfirði, Íslands
2020 (Ongoing)
Artist book // paper, ink
Typewritten compendium of seven stories for seven hikes conducted in the east of Iceland during the summer of 2018. Riffing on picturesque theory which states that landscape foregrounds should be artful and planned, middlegrounds, pastoral and rustic, and backgrounds, rugged and wild; and the work of picturesque travel hunters.
Ongoing project, to be bound and editioned.
Excerpts:
The spit between comes to a point. Seabirds nest on the ridged sedimentary layers exposed within each chasm, riding micro wind systems to whirl in spirals up and down, popping over the point almost slowly after the speed of their volutions as if in momentary stasis.
I stood on the point and the way down gave me vertigo, a feeling I’d never had before. I sat down and even then it felt like my brain was rolling around in my skull. Lying back was better, and the seabirds swooped up one chasm, over the point, and down the other, and even though they were wary of me it felt like I might have reached up to touch their wingtips.
In the fog they came and went like ghosts, and I wondered if anyone had ever died up there.
·
I chewed my lip and considered leaving the subsequent knocked stakes where they lay. The trail was clearer above the marshy valley, up the plateaus where the grasses lay flatter, still showing the effect of recent snow melt running over them, where the terrain grew rocky and streaked with sheep paths; they wouldn’t get lost. And someone ought to know the lengths I went to in providing the way.
The next handful of stakes had come loose from a series of cairns, the old trading route becoming clear as it led over the mountain to Norðfjörður. The stakes sat slack here, in pre-existing holes between the rocks that made up the cairns, and there was strangeness to sticking a modern marker on an ancient one.