Orli Swergold is a Brooklyn–based artist and curator whose hand-wrung paper-pulp paintings—applied to wood and metal substrates—investigate physicality by balancing the rigor of manual labor with delicate, up-close patterning. Treated as organismic entities, their wobbly or outstretched gestures reach beyond the rectangle to elicit empathy on a humanoid level. For Swergold, painting is serious play: a paradoxical collaboration with materials that blends control and unpredictability. Drawing on topography and psycho-mapping, she charts external and internal landscapes with channels, moats, rivers, and wings, while her uncanny color palette bridges the natural and artificial. By transforming pulp into layered networks of religious icons, bodily silhouettes, butterflies, letters, and fungal growth, her metamorphic works oscillate between the abject and the sublime, inviting reflection on alienation, tenderness, modern anxieties, and identity.
Swergold earned a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from Brandeis University (2018) and received an M.F.A. in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2021), where she exhibited in three juried group shows and won the Graduate Commons Grant. Her work is in the Brandeis University Library Art Collection and she has exhibited at Asya Geisberg Gallery, 81 Leonard Gallery, and Stephen Street Gallery. She has curated exhibitions at Soloway Gallery and the Cigar Factory LIC.
Lex is a composer, theatre-maker and sometimes-visual-artist living on Gadigal Country (Sydney, Australia).
“On approaching my time in Iceland, I knew I wanted to learn more about the Hidden People. I’m interested in cultures that interact with nature spirits as a way to make sense of hostile environmental conditions. As human-driven climate change is making all environments more hostile, I’m interested in how the nature spirits and hidden folk might be experiencing or reacting to this. How does climate crisis and habitat loss impact their world? So, this was the thread I was following.
I often make collages to help me find and develop a musical work. In Reykjavik, I chanced upon a book about Captain James Cook’s colonising voyages to Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific (in Icelandic?!). It quickly fell under my scalpel. This got me thinking about other kinds of ‘Hidden People’ – those whose lives and stories have been intentionally erased… the Indigenous peoples of Australia, brutally overrun by the malignant myth of Terra Nullius… our trans and gender-queer kindred whose hard-fought ‘visibility’ is being denied by the current US administration… These ideas and others swam around under the watch of the Mountainside, and under a unifying concept of We, The Hidden. I landed on a collection of lyrics and songs that I’m now developing further.
Central to the recordings I made at the Fish Factory is “the Tinkle Piano” (I will try to come up with a better name for it!), a prepared piano made by hanging gem stones and Balinese prayer coins on the strings of one of the old uprights at the Factory. This little video captures my first improvisation with it, getting to know how the tinkling and chiming works.
An enchanted sense of happenstance was the pervasive vibe of my time in Stöðvarfjörður. Things seemed to appear and disappear as needed. Clues to artworks surfaced everywhere. On the way, on a hunch, I picked up a kit for making cyanotype prints. Amazingly, on arriving at the Fish Factory, my fellow residents Shelley, Fien, Nicole and I discovered we all had materials and an interest in cyanotypes. It was such a joy to be working alongside each other, both together and on our own, playing with the chemical processes and comparing notes. 20 hours of daylight, an added convenience for solar printing. I found the cyanotypes were another way to access ideas about what is hidden and what can be revealed.
Thank you Kris, Lukas, Haffi, and my dear fellow residents. What an absolute privilege and pleasure it was to spend the most magical month of May with you in that very special place”.
I spent a lot of time in Iceland just feeling and thinking. At @fishfactory I felt ready to explore without an end goal. I spent my days relearning to use my hands; playing guitar chords and making ceramics even though I have no skill in either. I made linoleum stamps, wrote poetry, made copies and spent many moments by the shore or in the water. In between these moments I felt my larger thoughts about my political pieces shifting and I rediscovered intuitive making in my video practice.
I slowed down and nurtured the need for idle contemplation and experience. What pieces shift back into place when you remember what it is to exist presently in the body? Online slogans, like “cry about it” became premonitions or advice from the landscape. An Icelandic cure for being lost in the woods came to be a call to action in simplicity. One of the most radical things to participate in during times like these is to slow down, feel, and know there are certain truths that cannot be taken from you, like community and freedom…
Ritual, loss, cycles and time became familiar friends in Stödvarfjordur and I was excited to explore texture not just in the physical landscape, but the political one as well.
I left with a few projects started and ongoing with the hopes of returning soon to see them out 💙
Thanks to the amazing creatives I spent my time with @katelittletonrob @arimeyaki @brianconeryart @being_littoral @jessiekilguss
And of course Kris and Vid for always answering my many questions.
Jessie Kilguss is a singer, songwriter and performer based in Brooklyn, New York.
She has released 5 albums, most recently What Do Whales Dream About at Night in 2022.
She sang harmony and played the harmonium with Freddie Stevenson, opening for the Waterboys all over Europe on their Modern Blues tour.
Kilguss is a former actress who made the switch to songwriting after working with some of her musical heroes, Marianne Faithfull and Mary Margaret O’Hara, in the London and Sydney productions of The Black Rider, a musical written by Tom Waits and William Burroughs, directed by Robert Wilson. This experience inspired her to start writing her own music. Other acting highlights include a UK production (and subsequent UK & US tour) of As You Like It, directed by Royal Shakespeare Company founder, Sir Peter Hall and the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder.
I came to Fish Factory with the goal of writing 8-10 new songs. I’m happy to report I finished 9 new songs while there. I felt very lucky to have the use of Studio Silo, including all the instruments, to myself for the month. The view of the mountain, the fjord and the sky out the window was in constant flux and was mesmerizing and inspiring. I found the 24/7 daylight energizing. I started every day around 6am and headed straight to the studio to sit in the window, watch the view and write.
I usually write on acoustic guitar but was thrilled to have the use of a couple of electric guitars and a piano while I was there. I wrote most of my new songs on electric guitar and will be making the switch to this instrument now that I’m back in Brooklyn. It’s so much cooler than an acoustic guitar. I also brought a couple small synths with me and was writing on those as well.
I found the dedicated time and space for writing incredibly productive. When I’m at home I usually reach a certain point with a song and put it down to deal with various things in my day-to-day life. At Fish Factory, I had the luxury of time and space and was cut off from the demands of everyday life. I felt that I was able to go deeper with the process of songwriting by having this uninterrupted time. I also found it freeing to experiment with different instruments.
Stödvarfjordur is incredibly beautiful and peaceful. I especially enjoyed Petra’s Stone Museum and became and amateur rock collector while there, as did everyone else in my cohort. I really enjoyed getting to know the other participants in the residency and was inspired by their various disciplines and projects. I feel incredibly lucky to have had a month at Fish Factory and hope to return one day.
Thank you to Fish Factory’s wonderful staff: Kris, Vid and Lukas and to my fellow residents: Jane, Ayano, Kiley, Kate and Brian.
Now that I’m back in New York, I’m looking forward to sharing my new songs live starting with on August 6th at Sid Gold’s Request Room.
Brian Conery is a visual artist based in Richmond California, part of the Bay Area.
Before arriving at the Factory my practice was primarily about painting and works on paper. I came to Fish Factory wanting to explore abstraction more fully and also respond to any direct experiences here. At once I found the environment to be overwhelming and beautiful, the dominance of the fjord architecture, the sculpted cathedrals. Profound encounters with nature.
(…) During my time at the Factory I focused on 2D works on paper. This included small paintings and mixed media drawings, and experimented with small cyanotypes, using both natural and man made materials. I couldn’t resist drawing portions of the sea wall and also rediscovered the beauty in kelp leaves. Back home I have been collecting dried kelp and developing sculptural concepts such as seeing them as ‘bones’.(…) Other projects included a ritual of writing the names of many friends lost in the last 4 years and tossing them into the ocean. (…)
Lately I have been thinking a lot about time, and its weight and meaning in this stage of my life. My experience here became more about time than I even expected, seeing it as fluid in a different way than at home, partly from 24 hour light but also a sense of absolute freedom. Along with the fluidity was a heightened awareness of sound, both the environment and water(…)
I think we all come to these places with lots of expectations of what we want to do and achieve, but I’ve tried to allow profound small moments to guide me. The ever present sea walls were a surprise and an inspiration. I’m certainly leaving here with more questions than answers, and more ideas to pursue with lots of material to inject into my daily studio practice going forward. Our cohort of 6 was a great mix of disciplines, and all serious creatives perfecting their craft, and a joy to get to know them and form a new community, if even for a short time.
Thank you to Kris, Vid, Lukas and Haffi and all the best to our wonderful cohort: Ayano, Jessie, Jane, Kate and Kiley.
Simon Berz is a transdisciplinary artist, drummer, and sound researcher from Switzerland who explores the intersection of natural environments, geology, and contemporary sound art. During a residency in Iceland in 2015, he began working intensively with Icelandic basalt stones—materials millions of years old—and developed the TECTONIC instrument, which combines these stones with real-time electronic processing. Using contact microphones, effects, and synthesizers, he creates immersive soundscapes that reflect the elemental forces of Icelandic nature.
In 2025, Simon returned to Iceland for the production of a new TECTONIC LP. To capture the unique creative process and the powerful Icelandic landscape, the Swiss filmmaker Andi Hofmann accompanied the project throughout the recording sessions at Studio Silo. Hofmann’s experienced eye and narrative sensibility resulted in a documentary that not only shows the making of the music but also visually conveys the dramatic interplay between nature, sound, and artistic collaboration.
Together, their work invites audiences into a sonic and visual world—where ancient stones, electronic innovation, and the Icelandic environment meet in both music and film.
Mariam Gouverneur Mckeown is a writer currently living in Suffolk, United Kingdom. She writes poems, essays and stories (in that order) about the things she sees and feels.
***
For me, one of the most difficult things about being a creative person is coming to terms with it. How silly it sounds sometimes to hear myself saying “I write,” in a world on fire. I feel an intense pressure (internal? external?) to explain and to justify the constant, near pathological urge to respond to this chaos (internal? external?) with the simple act of making.
It was in this angsty state that I arrived in Iceland with no big project in mind and the vague worry that perhaps I wouldn’t manage to write anything at all. Within a day, the words were pouring out of me with a simplicity and easy pleasure that I hadn’t experienced in years. Maybe ever. Cheesy, perhaps, but true.
We quickly settled into a vaguely cultish kinship. We shared skills and freshly baked bread and stories and everything else. We went on hikes and day-trips with the ever-generous Kris, went to a concert even, drank coffee with Lucas, painted easter eggs with the village kids, laid down flat in the middle of the street at 1am alone and watched the aurora dancing. We made ceramics and cyanotypes and spoons and wrote poems about each other. We laughed a lot and cried a lot and, above all else I think, we trusted one another and the place itself in a way that is very rare and even more special.
Through all this, I made a wonderful discovery: all these not-writing things were helping me to write. I had heard this before, of course, but never experienced it for real until then. The cyanotypes I made clarified and expressed my feelings and thoughts around prayer in a way that words couldn’t have. Whittling encouraged an empty-mindedness that writing seldom does. And Stodvarfjordur is full of beauty. Freed from the strain of being my creative everything, and fed by so much wonder, my writing seemed to recall its own direction and clarity.
Over April, I produced a collection of poems and essays (as yet untitled) all specific to and written during my time in Stodvarfjordur, which I hope to publish soon enough. The poem included here is part of that collection. The immediacy and simplicity of the landscape in particular encouraged a new playfulness in my work. The collection deals with loneliness, wonder, fear, prayer, hope, lunatic happiness, etc.
I am proud of the work that I produced in Iceland, but more than proud I am really just grateful beyond words. The Fish Factory is the safest, kindest creative space I have encountered. At the Fish Factory, in Kris and Lucas’s boundless patience and generosity, in the locals’ welcoming attitude, and in the profound closeness and simple joy we shared as a cohort, I found a community that expanded the limits of what I thought that term could mean. I learnt to make and to talk about making, both my own and others, with a comfort and a thoughtfulness that I have not before. I was reminded of the real worth of it all. I grew up, really.
Thank you, Fish Factory! Thank you fellow fishies! I love you!
SOMETIMES (ALWAYS)
sometimes the whole world just sets you on fire
sometimes you’re just walking down the street and your knees go weak with it
mountain swallowed red
mountain exhaled black and white
sometimes you wake up
and the sun is taking
one fantastic, double jointed
wide armed stretch
against your bedroom wall
and even spellbound disbelief
would be a blasphemy
sometimes life is so good you can’t help but believe it
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.”
Peter Klett is an artist based in Washington, USA.
Thank you to my hosts Kris and Lukas; to everyone in and around the town of Stöðvarfjörður; and to my fellow residents Adele, Elise, Fien, Lulu, Marina, and Naomi. I am humbled by your kindness and generosity.
Fien Brakkee is a multimedia artist based in the Netherlands. Her work is a poetic and sensitive exploration of the physical and spiritual relations between the landscapes that surround us and the landscapes that live within us. Inspired by the ephemeral evidence of memory, vivid yet untouchable atmosphere of place and the sometimes elusive elements of our existence, Fien hopes for her work to create opportunities to slow down and pay attention to the tender and still things that our harsh, fast paced and chaotic society tend to rush past.
My time at Fish Factory was immensely glorious. It is hard to express the depth of impact it has had on me as an artist and also as a human being. Being here in this grand landscape has felt like meeting the earth in her most pure, wild and free form. Witnessing that and being among it has allowed me to grow, soften, connect, love, explore and experiment in ways I could have never imagined.
During my two month residency I followed the flow of days and the curiosity in my hands. I did many different things such as: continued my growing love for ceramics by handbuilding works and learning how to throw on the wheel, creating many cyanotypes with gatherings from the land, learning how to felt with Icelandic wool, carving my first spoon and writing, drawing and playing around endlessly. It was freeing to just spend my time making, without purpose or pressure. To follow my intuition and the inspiration this landscape gifted me. It opened up an opportunity to reflect on previous work, recognize the themes and wonderings that tie them all together and deepen those explorations further. The result is a body of work that feels like a beginning of things coming together and that fills me with excitement to continue on this path being here has set me on.
Looking back I will remember the beautiful walks and drives, many deep and sensitive conversations, the warm hugs and the laughs, the snow on the mountains, the singing birds at night, the dancing aurora in the sky, a glimpse of the midnight sun and making friends for life.
Leaving is hard but I go with bags full of inspiration and a heart full of tenderness and warmth. Thank you so much Kris and the whole team at Fish Factory, you created a magical place that I can’t wait to come back to one day.
my month long residency at fish factory was an entirely unexpected journey.
before getting here, i was at my residency in rural finland, wondering where i would go next. in the quiet winter and a deep conversation with my grandpa rock friend, they asked me:
“if you don’t have to worry about money or anything, where would you want to be in this world?”
the answer emerged almost immediately: i want to go play with clay in iceland.
so by the time i arrived at fish factory, i had about $100 in my pocket. this was the wildest way, even for a traveling artist, to follow nothing but my intuition to this magical, eerie place.
i spent the entire month basking in iceland’s strangeness, held in complete acceptance by my residency mates, diving deep into play with my inner child and other spirit beings.
my art is all about healing with my inner child and making art together with her. this month, we sat together and decided to unpack a layer of memories and quiet grief surrounding my queerness.
we joined songwriting circles, shared stories of spirit encounters, spent long hours in the ceramics studios, and basked in the warmest, most vulnerable kind of conversations.
this place didn’t just accept my weirdness ——— it reminded me how sacred it is to be bathed in it.
fish factory embraced me unconditionally and gave me space to tell the stories that had been waiting to surface.
thank you, fish factory & my march residency mates!
Martina Solárová Pauleová is a visual artist from Slovakia. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in 1998. In her life, she has welcomed her sunny sons: Tadeáš, Martin, and Kristian.
In my recent work, the passage of time and shifts in scale play a central role. The piece is composed of layered paintings, photographs, and drawings.
Here at the Fish Factory residency, I’ve been working on a project called Invisible Tattoo. It’s about the stories we all carry inside — the ones no one else can see. Black and white photos of my dad on a ski trip as a student are hidden in the cat’s whiskers. This is a tattoo of happiness.
Thank you to all the friends I met here and to the Fish Factory! 🦭💘 Scott, Charlotte, Risa, Seiu, Shann, Alex, and Kris :)
Marina Guiu Almenara is a multidisciplinary artist working in visuals and theatre, based in Barcelona. Using arts as political activism for children’s rights and against sexual violence to women. Through illustration, painting, printmaking, writing, and performing theatre, she seeks to generate a tension between the poetic and the political creating a bridge between the social and the artistic.
The main objective during my residency at Fish Factory was to explore the visual side of my project “La Muda. Un agujero entre el esternón y el ombligo”(*), a documentary art project about sexual assault of children and sexual violence narrated in first person; structured in three parts: a theatre play, a compilation of testimonies and an illustrated book. I’ve been focused on exploring the similarities between the Icelandic landscapes, volcanoes, lava and the cracks opened on the earth, to the feelings that remain in your body once you have been sexually assaulted: fear, rage, shame, nausea. The result is a collection of drypoints and different monotypes with the same sinuous and mysterious shapes of the landscapes surrounding Stöðvarfjörður. All this using the small and powerful etching press in the factory.
I’m feeling immensely grateful to been able to share all this process and daily life with my loved fellows, creating real support and safe spaces for listening, taking care of each other, crying, laughing, carving spoons, doing ceramics, printing cyanotypes and sharing everything. A lovely April.
(*) “The Mute. A hole between the sternum and the navel”
Shannon is a US ceramicist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her focus during residency consisted of a compilation of lighthearted experiments as she attempted to push the envelope of color, canvas, form and purpose. Shannon’s work often surrounds themes of queerness, femininity, aging and humor. To her, ceramics serves as a vessel for exploration, curiosity and community.
During my March residency at Fish Factory, I spent lots of time getting to know the petri dish of moss that covered the neighboring foothills. The soft, forgiving nature of Icelandic moss creates an environment that inherently encourages play- what a joy!!
I came to the Fish Factory without a specific goal, just the intention to create everyday. I immediately dove into exploring what surface design and small batch production could mean to me. I found myself in the clay studio mimicking landscapes I hadn’t even seen yet! The collective energy of the residency space and the people inspired immediate, almost urgent, acts of lively creativity. The ceramics lab became a haven of playfulness and community as it absorbed other resident artists looking to experiment with a new medium. Some would come for a day, another would stay for the entirety of the month. It was very special to watch others fall in love with clay in real time!
I am extremely grateful for this opportunity to create, experiment, laugh and explore at Fish Factory! Thank you to all who made it possible and to all who made it special!
Alexandre Lapointe Thibault (LeRøux) is a multidisciplinary artist from Quebec, Canada, working at the intersection of music and video. During his Residency at the Fish Factory, he worked on instrumental piano compositions deeply influenced by nature, drawing inspiration from the vast and rugged landscapes of Iceland. Routine and repetition emerge as key themes, evoking the passage of time, the essence of travel, and the meditative nature of movement. Blending impressionistic visual aesthetics with contemporary production techniques, Alexandre approaches his work like a filmmaker—layering images, cutting string samples, and rearranging them over intricate drum loops. His creative process mirrors the rhythms of the environment, capturing the interplay between organic textures and structured soundscapes.
Through an intuitive exploration of sound and moving images, Alexandre built an immersive experience that transports the listener and viewer into a contemplative state. His experimental approach blurs the boundaries between music and film, creating works that feel like an entry into a world—where time stretches, contracts, and loops. By layering shifting images of natural landscapes—roads, water reflections, wind-blown grass—he constructs a sense of fluidity and transformation.
The Fish Factory is a badass, fabulously outfitted DIY oasis of a space for art and culture. I loved working within a multinational group of artists practicing in a range of media—from ceramics and drawing to electronic synth and neo-classical music composition and video. I loved being a part of this amazing community built by staff and organizers committed to living and supporting creative lives. Here, within the quiet peace of the village and the beauty of the harbour and the surrounding hills, I accomplished everything I’d planned.
At the Fish Factory I worked on a project involving documented performance art leveraging rhetorical absurdity, reflecting on the dissonances and complexities of arctic touring during a time of ecological and other crises.
The project began when I hand wrote over one-hundred letters asking people in my art world to gift me with instructions for performance to enact and document while on an artist residency in Svalbard in August 2024. I invited entrusted colleagues to share in tender and critical dialogue about art, memorial, witness, mortality and so on, and fulfilled close to forty instructions, wrapping up the final actions in March in Stodvarfjordur. Instructions included collecting my tears to exchange with glacier water, singing a Russian song about polar bears making the Earth go ‘round, performing certain gestures of apology, and leaving no trace.
I wanted to make serious and imaginative attempts to make sense of the sublime within a landscape so emblematic of the zeitgeist of these times. To self-justify my return to Svalbard I needed to continue my explorations of constructed and mythologized landscape, grounded in human relations and interventions with the environment.
The Fish Factory was the perfect place for me to process images, videos, and sounds I made for these documented performances, while writing creative nonfiction about the project.
Risa Horowitz is a visual and media artist based in Saskatchewan where she is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina.
Visual and recording artist Scott Murphy stayed at Fish Factory in February and March, continuing recording and mixing his debut collection of four EPs with his homemade 70’s-style modular synthesizer. Moody winter weather and long hours of darkness were the perfect companion with which to lose myself in sound and are reflected in its content. My time in Iceland provided both the solitude needed to flesh out completed works and advance my process as well as a peer group of talented artists to challenge and inspire me and make the experience truly memorable.
Iceland’s strangely familiar yet entirely new landscape has provided the space to play, contemplate, and freely explore my process without distraction or dictation. Its ever-changing landscape has seeped into my practice in ways I hadn’t expected, shaping my approach to material, repetition, and the unknown.
Having access to a ceramics lab has revealed a curiosity for clay! Previously, my practice focused on removing conscious thought—through repetition, erasure, and collage—to unearth something unknown. Ceramics, however, holds its own mysteries. The meticulous process—hours of coiling, sculpting, and refining—followed by the unpredictability of the kiln, where a piece might crack, collapse, or transform entirely, has captivated me. There is a surrender in this process that feels integral to my work going forward.
What was supposed to be a one-month residency became three months in Iceland, drawn in by the people, the place, and the creative freedom I’ve found here. I leave with a practice tangled and reshaped by the space. Thank you, Kris, Lukas, Vinnie, and all the residents who have made this time so gorgeous.
Charlotte Searle is an artist from the UK who explores fictional multiplicities and knotty, entangled themes that resist definitive answers. She plays with concepts of place and non-place, home, mysticism, memory, and desire. By exploiting iteration and automatism, she harnesses the subconscious while inviting an unsettling awkwardness. Charlotte’s practice employs messy, irreverent methods of play, embracing mistakes and humour. Her works aim to consume and regurgitate, revealing imagined spaces in constant flux, where chaos, absurdity, and clarity intertwine—inviting a space for the mind to wander.
Ada Leenheer is a mixed media artist based in the Netherlands.
During my residency at the Fish Factory in February, I sought to move beyond the surface – both my internal and external landscape. Investigating the human condition, I embraced chaos and mystery, pushing each gesture and iteration to its limits, allowing chance and uncertainty to shape my process.
Iceland’s ferocious landscape first appeared impenetrable—fierce mountains, beautifully clear waters, and a raw, ever-changing climate. Its surface resisted, unyielding, yet beneath it pulsed a vibrant, almost vibrating energy. The longer I spent here, speaking with kind Icelandic people, the more I sensed the existence of hidden layers—realities woven into the land itself. I greeted the idea of humanlike ‘hidden people’ embedded within the nature – allowing it to seep into my practice.
These layers revealed themselves gradually. Every tear, every cut, every placement fractured the surface, exposing something deeper. My process became a dance – moving towards and away from mycanvas, letting colour and form spread and collide, uncovering what might exist beneath Iceland’s seemingly impermeable structures. The work grew through accumulation and erosion, each mark a fragment of something larger, something shifting.
Continuing my research into rhizomatic thinking (Deleuze and Guattari), I aimed to dissolve rigid logic, embracing an adjacent, wandering state of mind – focusing on the in-between. Mystery and unpredictability became part of the work itself.
The Fish Factory provided space for rest and contemplation, where my process could freely unfold. Swimming in the clear, turquoise harbour became a form of resetting too! Thank you to Kris, Vinnie, Lukas, Haffi, and my fellow residents for proving a generous space. And to Gunnar and Petra in the stone-working space for being so kind
Ludovica Perosin is an artist based in Scotland. She works with the themes of humor, drama, solitude and playfulness. Mainly a print-maker, at Fish Factory worked on embroidery on paper. She hopes her pieces speak for themselves.
Chris Vola is a writer and bartender based in New York. A graduate of the Columbia University MFA program, he is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories, three books of poems, a coffee-table conspiracy theory book, and three books of cocktail recipes. His most recent work is The Cocktail Atlas: Around the World in 200+ Drinks, a collection of beverages from 195 countries and an exploration of global spirits culture.
I came to the Fish Factory because I wanted to flee the noise of the city to work on my next book, Drink One for the Team, which celebrates global sporting events by pairing them with appropriately themed cocktails. What I found in Stöðvarfjörður was less of an escape than a revelation, from the jagged exquisiteness of the mountains and fjords and drastically shifting weather to the hushed village streets and the inimitable energy of the studio.
I finished as much of the book as I needed to – East Iceland in January isn’t exactly heavy on distractions – but the best moments had little to do with rigid productivity. Hiking to nearby beaches, geological formations, and the harbor (when there weren’t power-outage-inducing blizzards), chatting with other artists, vibing to live Icelandic punk rock, and taking in the aurora, polar stratospheric clouds, reindeer, etc., tapped into a creative flow state that had been absent for a couple years. I wrote some poems and restarted work on a collection of haiga – a Japanese artform featuring a short poem (haiku, senryu) combined with a visual element (photography in this case) – based on my travels in the Nordic countries. Stöðvarfjörður will undoubtedly feature heavily in the final version of the project. Something, along with my time at the Fish Factory, for which I will always be grateful.
Kate Wurtzel (Ph.D) is a visual artist, art educator, and professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, United States. Her previous work focused on emergence, body movement while painting, and the importance of ritualization in the creative process for someone who is neurodivergent and has a physical disability. She initially went to the Fish Factory to investigate how her own non-abled body responded to the landscape, and to write and paint through the lens of embodied phenomenology, however when she arrived the work and some life elements took an unexpected turn.
In Kate’s own words, she explains: During my short stay at the residency we encountered severe weather fluctuations and at the same time I was going through some life changes as well. My body responded to the weather with tenacity, persistence, some anxiety and pain, as well as significant periods of joy and physical-emotional peace.
As a response to the environmental situation and the points of reflection in life, the work became less about physical-bodily responses and more about accessing internal strength and a need for more relational intimacy overall. Inspired by the quiet majestic strength of the mountains in the Eastfjords, and the deep and nearly primal connection to the land when in Iceland, the work shifted to reveal a desire for connectivity to spirituality, bodies, stories, ancestors, magic, and more.
Consequently, my time at the Fish Factory opened an unexpected portal of desire; it revealed a need to understand my felt-embodied-connection to Iceland and investigate ancestral histories that touch-in to the supernatural and move beyond linear ways of knowing. The short, yet incredible, residency set me on a quest to know more about these deeply sensed experiences, including the complexity of relational intimacy, and the well of intra-connected ancestral strength we carry on an affectual level that often can only be accessed through creative gestures and sensed-ties to land/place.
While the end result may not have been about the non-abled body in Iceland as planned, ultimately what emerged highlighted a need to move beyond the binary of abled/dis-abled, and instead reach for an expression of strength and connectivity in several ways.
Based in Dubuque, Iowa – as Midwest USA as it gets – Jenni Brant is a ceramicist, arts administrator, and advocate for community-driven creative initiatives. Her clay work is recognized for its distinctive color palette, slip-trailing technique, and attention to ornamentation in functional pottery.
During her November residency at the Fish Factory – Creative Centre, Jenni explored two creative directions: translating her recognizable pottery style into wearable ceramic accessories and experimenting with black porcelain, a stark departure from her usual pastel hues. Inspired by Iceland’s landscape and plant life, she adapted traditional forms and patterns, allowing the environment to shape new designs and techniques.
Formed in the land of fire and ice, where life pushes through volcanic rock and flourishes in the extremes, Jenni’s ceramics serve as quiet reminders of resilience, adaptation, and the deep connections that shape our journeys. Through these pieces, she hopes to share not just the visual beauty of Iceland but also the intertwining stories of loss, transformation, and the unexpected places where life—and art—take root.
Now, through June 8, 2025, the work Jenni created in Iceland—along with photographs, videos, and journal entries documenting the residency—are on view in a solo exhibition at the Dubuque Museum of Art.
I’m an American multimedia artist with a background in theatre, photography, cinema, stone carving and, most recently, clay. After graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama, I left the acting world to study performance and media at the University of Texas at Austin and, later, filmmaking at EICAR, the International Film & Television School in Paris, France.
While I have moved between different industries and art forms over the years, all of my aesthetic work is connected by a love of light, color and rhythm as well as a tactile investigation of the invisible energetic threads tying elements together in both the natural environment and the social, human world.
During my time at the Fish Factory, I fell in love with the Icelandic landscape and its constantly changing patterns of weather, light and color — an awe-inspiring spectrum I have never seen before. I was also inspired by the generous interdisciplinary exchange of cultural and artistic ideas among our dynamic, talented group, which I believe advanced my own practice by leaps and bounds. Every day in Stödvarfjördur brought the gift of something new, and I will always be grateful for this unique experience on a personal as well as a professional level.
