Jessica Auer, a Canadian visual artist based in Montreal, Quebec, still remembers the first time she visited L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site in Canada’s Atlantic province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The site is famous in Canada for showing evidence of Viking settlement from over 1000 years ago.
“These traces that I was witnessing were so subtle but at the same time, very enigmatic,” Auer said. “I became really curious about it, curious enough to go and actually investigate this myself.”
Art project
Auer, also a photography instructor at Concordia University in Montreal, set out over a number of years to photograph Norse sites throughout Scandinavia.
Her series of photographs, titled Saga Lands is now on display at the Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie, a international exhibit focusing on photography.
Also showing is her video Still Ruins, Moving Stones filmed in Greenland while archaeologists worked on an old Norse site.
To find out more, Eye on the Arctic spoke with Jessica Auer about her projects, Viking history and what exhibits like these can bring to an audience:
The trailer for “Still Ruins, Moving Stones”:
Still Ruins, Moving Stones, 2 min excerpt from Jessica Auer on Vimeo
Write to Eilís Quinn at eilis.quinn(at)cbc.ca
Related stories from around the North:
Canada: Canadian polar photographer: Arctic change is a “wake-up” call, Radio Canada International
Finland: Heritage hunting in Finnish forests, Yle News
Norway: History revealed by WW2 wrecks in Norway’s Arctic fjords, Barents Observer
Russia: Photographing Arctic water creatures, Alaska Dispatch News
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