When Hildur Jónasson returned to Iceland, her country of birth, in 2012, it was mainly to give her Albertan-raised children a chance to connect with her side of the family and immerse them in the Icelandic language. In that sense, her family’s year-long stay was a success. But it also came with a shock: Like the language she was raised with, her country’s glaciers were dying.
Specifically, she found that the Snæfellsjökull glacier (SNIGH-fells-yuh-kulk) was predicted to be gone around the year 2050. “I could see it growing up,” Jónasson says. “In Iceland, it’s visible across the bay from the capital city. It features prominently in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth — that’s where they go into the earth, through that glacier. And there’s a lot of folklore and mythology from the Viking Age, that there’s a treasure in there, and it’s believed to have certain powers. So it’s a cultural icon, and it will be gone.” Two years later, another locally well-known glacier, Okjökull (OWK-ya-kulk), lost its glacier designation.
Western Canadians are familiar with glaciers melting in the Rocky Mountains, but more locally, it would be akin to returning to Edmonton and finding out that, in a couple decades, the river valley will be gone. For Jónasson, this brought immense grief, “like losing your godmother, or your favourite aunt. It gave me a sick feeling in my stomach, and sort of shifted something for me.”
This far into the climate crisis, that feeling Jónasson experienced now has a name: ecopsychology, which studies the “psychological, emotional and spiritual side of the climate crisis” and the detrimental effect a lack of exposure to nature has on our mental wellbeing. Simply put: not getting out in nature, and watching natural wonders disappear due to our collective actions, is more than just a bummer.
As a multi-disciplinary artist specializing in printmaking, Jónasson focused her grief into art, and in 2017, she got a lot more of both as a participant in the Arctic Circle Artist Residency. Jónasson went “on a tall ship” in a climate that “makes Iceland seem almost tropical” with 29 other artists, filmmakers, writers, scholars, painters and glass artists from around the world. “It’s very hard to write about the experience because it’s breathtaking, it’s ethereal, like stepping into Narnia.”