Shelley Simpson is a visual artist from Aotearoa New Zealand.

She attended the residency after completing her PhD. “It is a long journey from Aotearoa to Iceland. I was interested to think about what it means to be a guest or manuhiri in such a place- so far from my home. In my creative practice I often work with minerals and metals and I was keen to find out how it would feel to be in a landscape such as Iceland. How might minerals be thought of as hosts? How might my strategies for working with earthly materials shift in a different location? The earth in Iceland felt very active- earthly forces are very apparent, boulders fall from mountains, volcanoes erupt, the ground shifts and flows.

I visited the historic mine site at Helgustadir where the crystal Iceland Spar was mined. This crystal had a unique property – double refraction – and was used in imaging technology. I used the crystal in pinhole cameras, refracting the summer sun and capturing the light on photographic paper.

Over the month of May in Stöðvarfjörður, the days grew longer and longer, until there was almost no night darkness. Walking home from the studio at 1am, the birds would be singing.

Capturing light became my main activity during my time at the Fish Factory as I worked with seaweed and lupins to make lumen prints and cyanotypes. Light and shadow, air and earth, water and stone. My fellow residents, Lex, Nicole, Fien, Adele, Naimh, and Einar filled the time there with great conversation, meals together, walks and working alongside. Kris, Lukas and all the other Fish Factory people were generous and kind.

The Fish Factory building itself is an artist’s playground. Each day was a luxury filled with art making. Focus both blurred and sharpened, the mountains across the fjord were both close and far, scale shifted, all the rocks at Petra’s hummed with their long, slow existence. And the sun shone, and shone and shone.”

@shelleylsimpsonartist

www.shelleysimpson.co.nz