Inbetween narration and documentation, Lena Gudd (1986) explores the interplay of inner and outer landscapes within an imaginary and geographical North. As self-taught artist and with a background in European Studies, Gudd draws on aesthetic and anthropo-geographical research as well as on long-term field studies in the Subarctic and Arctic regions. Through 'Wild und Frei' she engages in particular with female instinctual nature following the traces of an inner Wild Woman, while her research on the North Canadian mining town Fermont attempts to grasp the mutual relationship between man and his milieu. Together with Antonin Pons Braley she constitutes 'An Archive of Norths' at the core of their art and research lab Tumuult.

For her image-based work, Gudd is drawing on photography as a process, approach and philosophy, using the medium as compass to maneuver inbetween visible and invisible spheres. “Her standpoint is one that is not typical of her generation. Lena Gudd's camera of choice is a heavy, traditional 6x6 that allows for no more than twelve shots per roll. Her photography is made up of the unforeseen, of sparseness and tension. Lena Gudd likes the cold, the rain, and the fog of the northernmost regions, with Germany and Iceland but also and most of all Fermont, a Canadian mining town, the sites of her sensitive and unique anthropology. It is in the last of the West's remaining wild territories that she explores this imperceptible freedom, this unutterable presence: the invisible trace of people" -Michaël Houlette, director of the French photography museum Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau, 2015.