Tens of thousands of stones and minerals in Petra’s garden, Stöðvarfjörður

I always say that when nothing seems to be working, you need to come at it sideways. So this week when I had run out of inspiration, I decided to take my own advice.

To date my Stone Stories project has focused on stones as repositories of place, time and history. But this week I realised I was looking too much at the big picture, the wider landscape and it was time to pull focus and concentrate on the actual stones themselves.

It was perfect timing to go down the road to visit Petra’s stone collection, considered to be the biggest collection of stones and minerals in Iceland and perhaps in the world.

“…in her heart, Petra is an artist and she uses the stones as her material for artistic expression.”[1]

Tens of thousands of coloured rocks fill her house and garden from white crystals to crimson red and bottle green jasper and the blackest of obsidian.

Petra Sveinsdóttir (1922-2012) whose name Petra, actually means stone in Greek, started her early years playing outdoors, surrounded by the mountains of the East Icelandic fjord town of Stöðvarfjörður.

From the earliest age she was fascinated by rocks, but it wasn’t until she married and had a house of her own that she started her collecting them and bringing them home. She had four children and would often pack lunches and climb the mountains with them, finding stones. She fashioned an over the shoulder basket to collect and transport them home in and the ones that were too heavy she either rolled down the hill or asked friends to help her carry them back.

When her children had children, she would take the grandchildren fossicking with her. Her collection spills out of the house and bookshelves, onto rows and rows of ledges and platforms in the garden which also expanded to absorb her growing collection.

Neighbours admonished her for collecting stones when she could be doing something more traditional like baking, but she paid them no heed and continued roaming the mountainside finding her gems. As the road through to the south was not built until 1962, 85% of her rocks and minerals were collected on her walks up the northerly slopes of the mountains around Stöðvarfjörður.

Her garden today is filled with spring flowers, little waterfalls and stones on every surface including a small garden house with information about Petra and some of the other items she collected in her life (matchboxes, handkerchiefs and swap-cards were among some of them). Many of the stones had detailed stories about where she found them. It was evident that Petra’s story is that of a life spent in pursuit of her passion. The legacy of her collection is now entrusted in the care of her family and grandchildren who open her home to visitors in the summer.

I returned to the studio changing my focus of image making from mountains and gardens of stone, to the vivid colours and shapes of the stones themselves. My cyanotype images were of the white shapes of cascading stones, my handmade papers were coloured with bright cotton pulps I had brought with me which amazingly replicate some of the colourful jaspers in Petra’s collection.

In this last week of my residency I can see how the love of stones has dominated this relatively isolated town in East Iceland. From Petra’s extraordinary collection to the stones from the mountains and the sea lovingly collected and placed in the gardens I walk past each day on route to the artist residency. I am so glad to have had this opportunity to experience the intimacy of nature as a story spanning millennia, crystallised in the coloured stones of this landscape of Stöðvarfjörður.

[1] Petra’s Stone & Mineral Collection website https://www.steinapetra.is/pictures/pictures-petra