In Utsi’s garden, on the long summer days when the sun never sets, the artist sometimes gets a split-second flashback to when she was young and the prospect of such a road was but a dream.

“Was it an isolated community back then? It depends on what you think a community should be,” she said. “Nordkapp is isolated compared to big cities, but human beings are great adapters and can get used to anything. For me this is completely normal.”

Living this far north has many benefits, Utsi explained, particularly for a visual artist. In 1982, she returned from Oslo to her birth house in Repvåg and ever since has been working as a sculptor, inspired by Nordkapp’s extreme realms of weather and light. She has worked with dwarf birch and turned driftwood into celebrated Sami art, but her current project is more ambitious. Using plexiglass, she is trying to recreate the wind. “You cannot touch it, but you can feel it in all aspects of life here,” she said. “Along with the water, it pervades everything we do.”