Icelandic artist turns thoughts of home into a new book

Icelandic artist Inga Lísa Middleton has paired blue-toned photographs with haiku in her new book, Hugsað heim, or Thinking of Home, mbl.is reports.

Middleton, who has an Icelandic mother and a British father, grew up in Iceland. After finishing secondary school, she studied photography and filmmaking in London, where she later settled and now works as an artist.

For the past decade, she has focused on fine-art photography, often using cyanotype, a process invented in 1842. She mixes the chemicals herself, paints the light-sensitive solution onto a surface and places negatives she has prepared digitally on top. Sunlight, water and light-sensitive salts produce the images, which are always blue and vary each time.

Writer and actor Sesselía Ólafs wrote haiku to accompany the photographs. Artist and designer Brynja Baldursdóttir designed the book. Middleton said the poems offer another perspective on the images, and that Ólafs sometimes saw things in them that surprised her.

Middleton also described losing her London studio in a fire. She had worked for five years in a former tobacco factory in north London, which housed 150 studios, when a fire broke out in one studio and the building burned down within hours. Her sketchbooks from the past 20 years and other printing materials were destroyed. She said she had kept few cameras, computers, hard drives or finished photographs there, and had come to terms with the loss.

She had been considering closing the studio and had applied for a master’s degree in Arts and Science. After being accepted, she was unsure whether to begin the course. The fire, she said, made the decision for her.