Charlotta María Hauksdóttir moved to California from her native Iceland in 2003, and has spent most of the intervening years trying to recapture the landscapes of her childhood. “After I moved away from Iceland, I felt this rootlessness,” Hauksdóttir says. “I didn’t realize how much the land had affected me, and when I started to travel I got a bit lost.”
On trips home, Hauksdóttir began taking hundreds of photographs of Iceland’s icy fjords, green mountains, and craggy shores. Back in her Bay Area studio, she would assemble the images into large-scale diptychs and triptychs representing not a specific location but rather her memory of those locations. A few years ago, she moved even further away from direct representation by cutting up photographs from different parts of Iceland and reassembling them in abstract shapes.
“There are plenty of amazing Icelandic landscape photographers who are doing a great job,” Hauksdóttir says, “so my idea was more to create these fictional spaces where I could show the effects of memory. Of course, it helps that Iceland is just a fairy tale landscape—it looks imaginary sometimes.”
For each of the works in her “Imprints” series, Hauksdóttir begins by designing a mockup image in Photoshop. Working from the mockup, she prints out the various component photographs, cuts them into abstract shapes, mounts them on foamboard, and reassembles them into four to seven layers, like a 3D contour map. “I’m not representing a place,” she explains. “I’m looking to engage the viewer so they are transported into the image.” Some of her most recent works employ a fingerprint motif, meant to suggest humanity’s impact on the natural world.
There’s also a more personal component to Hauksdóttir’s work. Since the age of 10, the photographer has suffered from epileptic seizures, which affect her perception of time and space. “They fragment my memory and distort my reality,” she says. “I have deja vu. I get disoriented.” The dream-like composites of Icelandic landscapes are a way for her to retain control over her memory.
“I can visualize an image and be visually transported back to that space," she says. "It’s a place to disappear into.” For viewers as well.
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