Emma Todd is an installation artist from Virginia, USA, working with multilayered, phenomenological, and playful approaches to space-making.

As part of the November artist residency, she spent a transitional winter period incubating in eastern Iceland, in its beautiful, complex landscape where a poignant sense of isolation paired with a warm togetherness at the Fish Factory.

Building on a developing line of artistic research, she experimented with micro-phenomenological methods by holding interviews with fellow residents. In these interviews, together they closely recapped moments of how the interviewees’ subjective experience unfolded in sensory, cognitive, attentional, emotional, bodily qualities in relation to an art installation.

They delved into experiential details of their moments with the installation. For example, orientation and surrounding affecting feelings of safety, feelings of being home, fragility, being guided by the installation, expectations for modes of interaction, calm, inrigue, getting in touch with the environment and wave sounds, feelings of softness of the beach, and so on.

Interview Excerpt 1:
Interviewer: So, there’s similar feelings at your beach at home that this enclosure brought you back to. How, I guess, how are you are you remembering or thinking or feeling the sense of home, like, how does that come up specifically while you’re at this beach here?

Interviewee: It was like a feeling in my body, it was like a feeling of my body, like, remembering something because of the elements around it. It was not necessarily, like, in my head.

Interview Excerpt 2:
Interviewer: So the sounds of the ocean feel intense because of, like, the danger, like, this sense of: wow, there’s sea behind me in the position I’m in. [Interviewee: Yeah]. Were these thoughts that you were having, or is it more of a general sense of that intensity?

Interviewee: I think it was a sensation. And it was a sensation, and then I tried to understand. Then I tried to understand: why do I feel that way? So, so, I couldn’t describe it. So I was, like, first I was feeling something, and then I was like: what is this?

Other artworks emerged as her practice fell into new rhythms that were set by the landscape: the rising and setting sun, and spending time with the sea and its patterns of take and return.

Website: emmatodd.art

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alucineris