Stuck in a glacier crack 1977 / Jökulheima barren wasteland, Iceland 2019

Gudrun Nielsen Reykjavík-based sculptor has spent most of her artistic career working in the UK. She has competed and exhibited at an international level and been granted many different awards for her art. Gudrun has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions, e.g. Sweden, Germany and Italy.

Gudrun aligns herself with the kind of three-dimensional art which might be called a modernist-based formalism with minimalist or constructivist overtones. The ‘Japan factor’ should be seen in the context of the second aspect of Gudrun´s ‘style’, her enduring interest in clear and concise forms and proportions, and in qualities such as lightness and harmony, in short, everything that contributes to the optimum balance of elements within the work at hand as well as the environment without. These are qualities traditionally associated with the Japanese attitude to mass and space, as seen in the work of their most prominent architects. A fundamental aspect of this attitude is a certain spareness with regard to materials, which is also something that Gudrun subscribes to. Adalsteinn Ingolfsson.

The Barren wasteland series. It was in the summer of 2019 that I traced my father’s footsteps to the old trails of the barren wasteland west of Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland. We drove up to the Jökulheima cabin buildt 1955 at the foot of the glacier. It shocked me to find out that the glacier had retracted about 10 km and we could just get a glimpse of it in the distance from the cabin. In this area of barren wasteland, I took photographs without realising at the time what I would use them for. Soon after the trip I started to work on my photos and merged them with my dad’s old images taken up to 70 years apart in the area and on the glacier. I wanted to express with collage the known facts, that forces of nature are unpredictable and nowhere are the opposites as great as in this barren wasteland. Where the white glacier's edge has retreated and wide areas of black sand and wasteland appear. The Mountain Series 2014 – 2018 of recycled materials influenced Gudrun by working in her Reykjavík studio on the site of one of Iceland’s leading providers of environmental management services and clean energy. “Slow but constant changes in the immediate surroundings made the work happen naturally”, Gudrun stated.