A love of a cartoonish sea bird led Stephanie Weinger ’20 on a quest to see one in its natural habitat in Iceland this summer.
Weinger wanted to see puffins, which she first became acquainted with as a child while staring at the Puffins cereal box as she ate breakfast.
“Embarrassingly, I thought that they were extinct,” she said. “I confused them with the dodo. I thought the cereal was a tribute to them.”
Weinger, who was awarded the Sis Grenald International Travel Fellowship in the spring, spent a week at the Light Grey Art Lab Creative Residency in Hosavik in August. She was one of 12 artists in a group dubbed Team Orcafolk by the residency leaders. Besides wanting to see puffins, Weinger was interested in the Icelandic terrain.
“Iceland has a very cool geographic landscape,” she said. “It’s sitting on a fault line, so a lot of geothermal stuff happens, which makes it really interesting.”
Weinger took advantage of the geothermal energy. The cottage she stayed in at Hosavik had a hot tub—a wooden barrel filled with groundwater warmed by the earth.
“A few other people and I would run outside in the rain and go into the hot tub at night,” she recalled. “It didn’t get dark until 11 pm.”
Weather was a big factor. Although her trip was in August, it was chilly and rainy at that time in Iceland. Weinger ended up having to buy gloves, “and I really wish I had had a scarf,” she said.
The elements scuttled a planned trip to Dettifoss, Iceland’s most powerful waterfall.
“It was snowing with 50 mile per hour winds,” she said. “They said, ‘Let’s just go to the fishing village instead.’”
The artists spent days getting more intimate views of waterfalls, botanical gardens and villages. “No one had to tell us twice to draw.” Weinger’s sketchbook is full of drawings and watercolors of Arctic plants, animals, landscapes and houses.
“Everything was a surprise,” Weinger said. “We weren’t allowed to know what we were doing til the day of. The night before they would tell us what supplies to bring.”
She also learned about Icelandic folklore, which is full of stories of trolls and elves.
“One of the days we went to a place called Dimmuborgir,” she said. “It means black castles. A volcano erupted and lava flowed over a marsh. The water underneath boiled and shot up while the lava was still cooling and the rock cooled and formed pillars. The Icelandic people believed that it was a bunch of trolls that came down. We looked for rocks that looked like trolls.”
She also ate traditional Icelandic foods like minke whale, which she proclaimed was “horrible,” and lobster soup.
The beautiful scenery has made an impact on her as an artist.
“I just learned to appreciate land formations a little more,” she said. “I always hated drawing landscapes, but now I find them to be a little more intriguing.” She also wants to “play around” with Icelandic architecture.
As for the puffins she longed to see, on a trip back from lava fields, the rain let up as the group stopped on a cliff.
“One of the people pointed down at ocean puffins,” she said. “I bought a $74 pair of binoculars so I could see them better. There they were, a few hundred feet down the cliff.” She got a better look at the birds later on a puffin-watching tour in Reykjavik.
