Self-Portrait with Seven Ghosts

When Hulda Hákon lived and studied in New York in the 1980s, punk and new wave culture were dominant influences, leaving a strong mark on her artistic practice. Despite being exposed to international currents in the metropolis, Hulda quickly gained attention for her personal and distinctive style. Her works are characterised by an everyday sensibility, references to folk art, and can be seen as a kind of contemporary folklore. She weaves together myths and fairy tales with narratives drawn from the present. Her works spark curiosity while remaining familiar, imbued with warmth and humour. Hulda refers to Icelandic folktales, recounts people and events from her own life, and at times introduces well-known figures from Icelandic public life. These stories take form as reliefs, constructed works, or three-dimensional sculptures. In this way, she poses questions about our collective national identity.

Hulda’s reliefs are typically rough in appearance, some resembling assemblages made from scraps of wood nailed and glued together, then painted in vivid and dark colours. The figures are cast in moulds, and no two are alike. Her working process and choice of materials are guided by a sense of inadequacy in relation to the subject matter. As she once stated: “This is a patchwork, and that’s why I want it to be this way” (Morgunblaðið, 3 April 1998). Hulda seeks to make her works timeless and does not aim to capture the spirit of a particular era. The woman depicted in the relief wears a relatively timeless dress, and the weather is characteristically Icelandic—neither rain nor sunshine. The stone wall at the bottom of the image may symbolise Icelandic cultural heritage; Hulda herself has likened stone walls to storytelling traditions. People continue to add stones to the wall, just as they continue to add stories.

Text occasionally appears in Hulda’s works and is often both ironic and poetic. In Self-Portrait with Seven Ghosts, the title is written on the wooden fragments at the bottom of the relief. On closer inspection, however, the ghosts depicted in the image number nine. This contradiction between text and image raises questions: is the artist unaware of the two extra ghosts, or is she deliberately misleading the viewer? Ghosts, after all, can be difficult to identify. Hulda has said that she enjoys playing with text in her images, sometimes using nonsensical phrases that open up unexplored paths. The work surprises the viewer and recalls the notion that things are not always what they seem. Perhaps, in the end, we all become ghosts.