Emi­ly Floyd
Ice­landic Puffins

For her tenth solo exhi­bi­tion at the gallery, Emi­ly Floyd has cre­at­ed a field of sculp­tures, enti­tled ​‘Ice­landic Puffins’. Deploy­ing great sculp­tur­al skill, Floyd has used a tra­di­tion­al hand-carv­ing tech­nique inher­it­ed from her toy-mak­er fam­i­ly to cre­ate each piece.

The indi­vid­ual puffins are adjoined with Ice­landic text iden­ti­fy­ing mem­bers of the finan­cial elite in Ice­land. Infa­mous­ly, the country’s econ­o­my col­lapsed in 2008 when its three major banks (Glit­nir, Lands­ban­ki and Kaupthing) default­ed on their inter­na­tion­al debt, send­ing shock­waves across the globe. It is said that Ola­fur Hauks­son, the police­man who lat­er pros­e­cut­ed the bankers, mapped the inves­ti­ga­tion on a white board in his office. Floyd’s piece play­ful­ly spec­u­lates on this rad­i­cal dia­gram by mir­ror­ing it in the instal­la­tion layout.

Floyd thus com­bines her inter­est in the seduc­tive pow­er of design with her engage­ment with ques­tion­ing estab­lished mod­els, here eco­nom­ic gov­er­nance and insti­tu­tion­al cri­tique. Under the veneer of the charm­ing allure of these puffins lies the dark real­i­ty of inter­na­tion­al finan­cial and polit­i­cal crisis.