Roni Horn: Mother, Wonder

The latest installment in Horn’s epic To Place series portrays Iceland’s mythic Landbrot.

In the south of Iceland is Landbrot, a place closer to fairy tales than to science—indeed, a place easy to imagine as the singular source of fairies and elves worldwide. It is easy, too, to imagine the sensual comfort and satisfaction to be found there. Mother, Wonder is the eleventh book in Roni Horn’s (born 1955) ongoing series To Place, which she initiated in 1989 and exists only in book form. All the volumes focus on Iceland and the evolving experiences of the artist there; together they form a flowing dialogue addressing the relationship between identity and place. The titles to date in the coveted To Place encyclopedia are Bluff Life (1990), Folds (1991), Lava (1992), Pooling Waters (1994), Verne’s Journey (1995), Haraldsdóttir (1996), Arctic Circles (1998), Becoming a Landscape (2001), Doubt Box (2006) and Haraldsdóttir, Part Two (2011).