Introducing Gabriele Glang, a German-American artist and bilingual poet from southern Germany, who spent the month of August at the Fish Factory. All her life, she has practiced both painting and writing, her creative work comprising both the visual and the literary. “The artist’s book is the perfect medium for me: a marriage between the written word and the image.”

Her German poetry debut, Goettertage, fictional monologues of the German Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, was published in 2017 by Kloepfer & Meyer (Tuebingen). In addition to her work as screenwriter and translator, she taught creative writing in English at the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen for many years. A painter and maker of artist’s books, her works have been published and exhibited widely in Europe and the US.

Her residency in Stödvarfjödur, part of a six-week journey circumnavigating the Icelandic coast, gave her the opportunity to gather impressions for a new body of work. At the Fish Factory she developed a visual language to express her responses to the sensory input of landscape and atmosphere of Iceland.

Foraging in and around the premises, as well as outdoors during walks on the heath and shoreline, Gabriele collected found objects from which she made mark-making tools, working in various water media, making artist’s books, collaging, and journaling about her impressions back in the studio.

Visit her website for more of her work: www.gabrieleglang.de 

or

Instagram to see recent work: gabrieleglang

Thanks, Gabi! :)

Meet Gabi Maynard, an artist and digital creator. She stayed with us in August.

“I recently completed my digital media studies at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, focusing on graphic design. Although I’ve created a lot of digital work, I still have a strong passion for traditional, analog media.

Initially I was planning on just pursuing printmaking at the factory, but reflecting on my time at the residency I’m surprised by how much I ended up experimenting with various mediums. I drew and painted more than I usually do, and discovered a new technique and style to my prints that I want to continue working on. Going to a brand new place by myself right after college was definitely nerve-wracking at first, but I’m very glad I did it. I think the experience has definitely helped me navigate what kind of artist I want to be moving forward and what I want to create.”

Visit her website for more of her work:

https://readymag.com/gsmaynardart/arte/

Thanks, Gabi! :)

Introducing Daisy Allen, an artist born and bred in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Daisy currently works in London, where her creative practice includes photography, illustration, art direction, and painting murals. We got to know Daisy in July, when she was here with only one other artist. She used this time to work on her personal projects, such as creating an art calendar with the help of visual backgrounds (on Zoom! :).

Daisy brought an airbrush, and she experimented with this machine, mimicking and recreating tattoo designs. She’s also a tattoo artist, and if you want to get stick-and-poked, you can catch her in London! Daisy is always on the lookout, searching for walls where she can paint murals, and she found one in Stöðvarfjörður at our Factory. Daisy got inspired while chit-chatting with the locals, relaxing in the local hot tub. That’s how the heitur pottur idea was born.

Daisy also worked with clay, creating different pieces, such as a candle holder and a small coffee cup. We also drove up to Seyðisfjörður for annual LungA festival!

To see more of Daisy’s work, visit her website:

https://www.daisyallen.co.uk/

https://www.instagram.com/_daisy_allen_/

Thank you, Daisy! :)

Edie is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Cornwall, UK. Her work shifts between film and animation to installation and costume for live performance.

‘I was drawn to the extreme, remote landscapes and harsh climates of Iceland, which have shaped the century-old mythology and its need for story. I used my two months in the fish factory to explore Icelandic folklore, making costumes and set to shoot my first reel of super8 film, which I plan to release in the upcoming months along with an analogue soundtrack which I recorded in the surrounding hills.’

Suzanne Yeremyan is a visual artist with a focus in experimental mixed-media abstraction.

During her attendance in the month of March, Suzanne spent the days outdoors and in the landscape, taking advantage of the fleeting window of daylight. Walking, searching, and observing is a crucial part of her process. Upon evening, she would then enter the studio and work into the late night. Suzanne opted to attend during the peak of Icelandic winter, as the harsh weather and unforgiving landscape observed in isolation immensely informs her work.

She aims to represent often overlooked visual subjects found in the natural world. Inspired by organic patterns, textures, and movement, her pieces are what she calls “homages” and result in something along the lines of abstract portraiture or detail studies.

Utilizing self-made solvents, washes, and pigments, her process often involves combining reactive elements and results in textures that have been described as caustic, and striking in detail.

For more, visit her website:

suzanneyeremyan.art

or follow her on instagram:

hellpix

Thanks, Suzanne! :)

Uncertain Studio is made up of Taiwanese artists Tao Chiang and Yen-Ting Tseng (a.k.a. Kappa). Coming from a theatre design background, they combine Tseng’s experiments in object theatre with Chiang’s ambient and aleatoric soundscapes to create spatial works that act as both performance and installation pieces. In their earlier collaborations, dramatic characters are replaced by daily objects to create mini-scale technical theatre with low-tech aesthetics, constructing portraits and narratives of human experience through the poetic utilization of objects and sounds which are, in themselves, lifeless.

In more recent years, they have been questioning the nature of performing arts, looking into the performative aspects of board games, workshops, and tourism to find new ways to discuss real world issues in a creative setting.

While at the Fish Factory, Tao experimented with sounds in our concert hall, ending his exploration with a performance and show-and-tell at the end of June. He gathered sounds and voices during the month and combined them into one long, wonderful, and relaxing soundscape.

Kappa researched the history of East Iceland and its industrial advances. She sees similarities between the islands of Taiwan and Iceland. She has created a map of East Iceland, its villages, population, etc., and provided an interesting overview of the area in a different light.

Check more of their work on their website: https://uncertainstudio.blogspot.com/

Thanks, Tao & Kappa! :)

Their stay was sponsored by National Culture and Arts Foundation (Taiwan) and Department of Cultural Affairs Taipei City Government.

We are introducing Gabe Duggan, an artist whose works bridge the realms of creativity and emotion. Gabe’s creations move boundaries, as they invite us to look at ordinary things with different eyes. Gabe’s versatility is shown through different mediums and techniques, and textile and technology provide a reliable foundation for Gabe’s work.

While at the Fish Factory, Gabe created a temporary installation in collaboration with the environment. Gabe’s recent work (WAS HERE, 2022; RECOHERE, 2021) was constructed of a synthetic, ballistic material, but in Stöðvarfjörður, Gabe worked with a naturally biodegradable material, cotton. Gabe drew large-scale lines across the land, which formed the word VISKUBIT.

One month of tedious but therapeutic work has ended with us walking about the cotton lines and following the direction of the letters, which are still imprinted into the fjord’s raw vegetation. The whole layout can be observed with a drone or even by satellite. The letters are slowly disappearing as the summer will soon end and snow will cover the banks where Gabe walked, thus ending the work whose self-destruction was the core impetus for its creation in the first place.

Visit her website for more of her work: w

Thanks, Gabe!

Eve is a visual artist from Rotherham, now based in Manchester. While at the Fish Factory, she explored Icelandic folklore and embodied creatures such as the Huldufólk by creating masks and incorporating local and natural materials into a full-body outfit.

She is fascinated by masks and performance, and she brought the roots of ancient stories alive through this medium. She created with paper mache, as working with such a simple material as paper represents to her a therapeutic process.

She hand-sculpted a few ceramic pieces and dipped them in a rusty-looking alligator glaze. The pieces were shipped home in a banana box (FRAGILE!). The masks she made were tried on by fellow artists walking about the fjord hilltops, perhaps hoping for the Huldufólk to descend from the misty mountains of Stöðvarfjörður.

Check more of her work on her website: https://www.evegittins.com/

or follow her on Ig: ewegittins

Thanks, Eve! :)

Introducing Violet Roest, a visual artist from the Netherlands. Her creative journey delves into the realms of emotion, colour, and expression.

She spent the month of June here with us in Stöðvarfjörður, but she’s been to this little village, before anyone thought of recording music, spinning pottery wheels, and painting portraits in the middle of a fish processing plant. She revisited old friends and used this time to think and translate feelings into visual narratives.

She worked with 3D objects made out of clay and plaster, and that’s how a family of whales was born. She also suited up, covered her boots with wet rags, and did some metal cutting with our plasma cutter! The whales were shipped home, but some unfortunately didn’t survive the journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

“Violet sculpts whales on our fjord, and friendships old and new”. -R. R.

For more of her work visit her website: https://www.expressie.nl/violetroest/over-mij/

Thanks, Violet. :)

Kukka Pitkänen is a Finnish visual artist working mainly in the field of printmaking and drawing, and during the residency, she worked on drawings, photographing and printmaking techniques.

Her works are often connecting human and nature, and in Fish Factory she focused on a lot of nature detail research, which she transferred to her drawings.

She drew nature forms, and she multiplied and scaled them into works. She is interested into the sea and the mountains, and she took inspiration from those natural elements.

Visit her website: http://kukkapitkanen.com/

Or follow her on instagram: kukkapitkanen

Thanks, Kukka! :)

Rhonda Rosenheck is an emerging poet, writer and biblical translator. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies and have been performed live. She lives in rural New York State, USA.

While at the Fish Factory, she worked on a translation project, and she delighted us with witty poems and ingenious verses. Rhonda offered her fellow housemates to attend her Thursday online yoga sessions, and she’s responsible for organising our equinox dinner gathering, followed by a midnight stroll up in the hills.

Publications include: The Five Books of Limericks; Sin No More! A Biblical Sea Shanty; Looking: Out, Up, In & Under Rocks; and Yiddische Yoga: OYsanas for Every Generation.

Visit Rhonda’s website for more of her work: https://www.rhondarosenheck.com/

Thanks, Rhonda! :)

Selena Unger is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based on Vancouver Island, Canada. She creates ceramic and paper mache sculptures, drawings, paintings, poetry, and installations.

Her work explores psychological phenomena as well as philosophical queries in a playful and colourful way that invites viewers to engage curiously in her chimerical constructions.

While at the Factory Selena worked on various sculptural projects creating a series of ceramic pieces titled Gastropoda, as well as two paper mache sculptures that explored dream symbols and mythical beings with connection to the location.

In addition to these projects, she also collaborated with a fellow artist in residence, Jikke Lesterhuis, by comprising a poem to accompany her animation titled “Wind Dwellers.”

For more of Selena’s work visit her website: https://selenaunger.persona.co/

or follow her on instagram @selena.unger

Thank you, Selena! :)

“I describe myself as an eco artist, because my work tries to raise the profile of the earth and climate change issues. By doing earth painting workshops where we forage for local soils and materials, and make our found pigments into paint. My aim is to show the earth in a new light, that the earth beneath our feet is a live organism not just dirt. We are totally dependent on the ‘skin of the earth’.

I managed to teach earth painting skills in the local school, and they made a phenomenal piece of work, out of the materials from their own town. It was important to me to give back to Stöðvarfjörður for all the beautiful pigments I found here.

I have loved my stay here, and would recommend staying for at least 2 months. It has provided me with the luxury of time away from home distractions, and enabled me to expand creatively. The atmosphere has been generous and friendly, with a lot of sharing of skills, from baking to IT help! It has lead to a freedom to experiment in the wide array of well equipped workshops here.”

Candide, we hope you enjoyed your stay here. :)

Take a look at her website!

https://www.candideturnerbridger.com/

Thanks,  Candide!

Elinor O’Donovan is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Cork, Ireland. Her practice references internet memes, cartoons, and film and tv tropes. Through playful sculpture, collage, drawing and installations, she teases out the ways that familiarity with common tropes in popular culture allows us to form cognitive shortcuts, influencing how we understand the world around us.

Drawing on theatre set-design, she examines the dichotomies of front-stage/back-stage, public/private space, and audience/performer. She often chooses to leave the raw materials of her work exposed, questioning what value remains when a work of art is sketchy and unformed.

At the Fish Factory, Elinor completed her first short film ‘The Immeasurable Grief of the Prawn’, which will be shown as part of a solo exhibition of new work at GeneratorProjects, Dundee, in July 2023. The film, which explores memory, knowledge and shite talk through inter-connected dialogues about prawns, has been made possible by support from the Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Moves Europe x Goethe Institute mobility funding.

For more of her work visit her website: https://elinorodonovan.com/

Thank you, Elinor! :)

Jikke Lesterhuis was born in 1997 in Enschede, the Netherlands and is currently based in Amsterdam. She works with different media such as animation (2D and 3D), field recordings & sound design, drawings, poetry and installations, making her work multidisciplinary.

She has spent the month of May 2023 with us here at the Fish Factory, working on her project titled “Wind Dwellers”, an explorative crossed media installation, oscillating between different worlds; the physical and digital domain, nature and culture, macrocosm and the microcosm, man and the universe. It explores the sensory capacity of the wind, that can be perceived by our bodies in multiple ways. The animation questions the extent to which humans can identify with the environment around us and what effect this has on our behavior and our feelings of responsibility towards the planet and the challenges it faces.

Animation

The landscape of the animation is based on topographic data of the mountains in Stöðvarfjörður, released by NASA Earth Observations (NEO).The use of raw natural materials to mimic human features highlights how man and nature are inextricably linked, and how we are more alike than we think. In fact, nature gave birth to all of us. Most of the sounds are field recordings of the area and serve as a sonic representation of Stöðvarfjörður.

Soundscape

The sound carries the story of man and nature and explores the mysterious borderland between the visible and the invisible and the audible and inaudible, touching on the spiritual and psychological aspects of consciousness. The poem binds the visual and sonic landscape and guides you through.

Sculpture

The cave is made of stitched seaweed and algae. The stitching reinforces the connection of something that was once broken but now continues to live in a new, unique, different but fragile semblance, of which we have to take care altogether to keep it from falling apart. The seaweeds transmit light, are translucent, but not transparent, and resemble a leather-like material after drying. The dried seaweeds remind us of how similar we are. The sculpture allows the audience to step into the mysterious borderland between themselves and nature. The physical movement required to view the inside of the cave shows us the way we should look at our surroundings; make ourselves a little smaller with a humble attitude and can only be touched gently. We should not take the planet for granted, as everything around us will continue to live inside of us.

‘Wind Dwellers’ arises from a deep fascination forone of nature’s most powerful yet unpredictable forces; the wind.

Please, visit her website to learn more about this unique and interesting project: https://www.jikkelesterhuis.nl/wind-dwellers

Thank you, Jikke! :)

Yini Luo, currently based in Shanghai, China, is an artist exploring the concept of reality through diverse media such as printmaking, glass casting, and natural materials installations. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Yini’s thought-provoking work has been showcased in exhibitions in China and the United States, earning her esteemed recognition, including the West Bay View Foundation Travel Grant. Her pieces are held in esteemed collections, including the Jinling Art Museum, CHAO Art Center, and private collections.

During her research in Iceland, Yini Luo found inspiration in the extreme weather conditions and the awe-inspiring natural surroundings. The rugged landscapes, lava stones, the majestic arctic ocean, and the tumultuous sounds of storms all deeply influenced her artistic perspective.

Immersed in the enchanting beauty of the East Fjords, Yini’s encounter with such diverse and captivating natural experiences forms the foundation of her Iceland art research.

Here’s a link to her website www.yiniluo.com

& check her work on instagram! https://www.instagram.com/yini_luo_/

Thank you, Yini! :)

Lorka Scher is a multi-instrumental loop artist, harpist & songwriter based in Portland, Oregon. Her songs have been described as intimate, medicinal and haunting. Drawing from her family’s experience as post-war Soviet refugees, she explores themes of belonging, cultural memory, and ancestral healing in her work.

Performing as a one woman “echo orchestra” Lorka blends breath, wordless melody, harp, cello and poetry into her songs. Through live looping, she is able to build delicate nuance and emotive detail into her work, which echoes the complexity and paradox of healing.

Lorka teamed up with Studio Silo during her residency, immersing herself in the production of a new album. She used her time to develop her skills as a producer, exploring new techniques, tools and methods while mixing part of her upcoming album. Lorka also reviewed historical footage and audio that has been part of her family’s immigration story. She began the process of archiving content that she will later combine into visual art to accompany the music.

Lorka is so grateful for the time spent in focused dedication. Big thank you to Vinny, Una and Kimmy for making it possible.

To follow along on production work, and hear Lorka’s music, please visit her online.

Instagram: @titlewillcome

Web: www.TheSpaceBetweenBreaths.com

Youtube : Lorka & The Echo Orchestra

Vimeo: Lorka & The Echo Orchestra

We invite you to take a loot at Lorka’s Song Diaries!

https://vimeo.com/660557090

Members of this international collective come from various creative fields; fine arts, dance, performance, music, sound engineering, and audiovisual communication. The collective does not yet have a name. During their stay at the Centre, the group focused on creating a new performance piece juxtaposing different elements from each of their professional fields.

“We used the opportunity at the residency to knit together a team to explore sound and movement. Experimenting with acoustic instruments, microphones, synthesizers, samples, and field recordings, we found ways to produce soundscapes and melodies based on trust and affection.”

Two members of the group, Otho and Erna Gunnarsdóttir are a part of the Icelandic Dance Company and the residency stay of the group was a collaboration between the Creative Centre and the Icelandic Dance Company. The performance piece the group developed during the residency stay was later on performed in the Reykjavik City Theather, the home of the Icelandic Dance Company.

Erna Gunnarsdóttir (dance/performance)

Felix Urbina Alejandre (dance/performance)

Maurizio Vuolo (music/sound engineering)

Carlo Vittorio María (music)

Claudia Izaguirre (audiovisual communication)

Thank you, guys! :)

Imogen Marsteller is a British-American artist who expresses herself through photography, painting and drawing. She completed her BA in Studio Arts and Art and Architectural History at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and at the University of Edinburgh.

During her time at the Fish Factory, Imogen explored her many modes of creation – finding more connections between each way of making. Her work tends to focus on the exploration of friends and becoming friends with oneself, and all that entails. She references Art Historical compositions and color schemes within her works. In particular through painting and working with thread. This brings out an aesthetic interest focusing on line and contrast, thus fusing a graphic sensibility with a painterly one. She continued to explore the idea of monumental and painting further by using stitched lines and forms. She also used different shaped canvas, paper, or multiple pieces to create a quilt type of work – to further break down the body.

Artist Statement:

From, my early Pre-Raphaelite influence to my most recent interest in aspects of the Renaissance, the Baroque and Pop art, I have fused a graphic and painterly sensibility, as evidenced by my strong use of line, color and shade, with a visual focus on contemporary intimacy. My paintings and drawings use stoicism in restrained poses and monumentalism on an expanded scale. While my photography borders on the humorous and the serious, the commercial and the artistic. I use my painting to self-examine while I use my photography to distort through a surrealist lens, to capture female play through both my self-portraits and my depictions of others. All my mediums result in ennobling the lives of women and enriching my practice both figuratively and literally.

Thank you, Imogen! :)

// Check the interview on Youtube //

Karen Morris is a visual artist from Richmond, Virginia and she joined us here at the Fish Factory art residency for the month of May 2021. She spent her time here in Iceland traveling and taking pictures of landscapes. During her residency, she painted with pastels and she used her photos as a reference. The end result was beautiful, photorealistic pastel paintings of the Icelandic landscape.

Karen spent a lot of her time here visiting surrounding villages and their attractions and she always selflessly offered a ride to the supermarket or to the Djúpivogur hot pot! :)

Thank you, Karen!

// Check the interview on Youtube //

Sami Cutrona is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, working in sculpture, photography, and related media. Sami received a dual MFA/MA in Studio Art and History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2020 and a dual BA in Photography and Art History from Lycoming College in 2017.

The center of Sami’s work here at the Fish Factory Residency was to challenge and shift photographic tradition, both conceptually and materially. Their work stems from their experience as a queer non-binary person and they create to connect and to invite the viewer to connect with their body. Sami is interested in exploring the body as a vessel for gender identity, queerness, body dysmorphia and trauma. They’re using self-portraiture to reclaim autonomy and disrupt how power and meaning have been inscribed on the body.

Sami printed out images on textiles merging 2-dimensional imagery with 3-dimensional support structures. What does contemporary queer art look like? What does gender nonconformity look like? Through abstraction and fragmentation, Sami seeks to answer these questions but also leaves them unanswered.

Thank you, Sami!

For more work check the website and watch the interview! :)

https://www.samicutrona.com/

Alba Suau is a Spanish visual artist whose work explores the isolation experience, which she defines as the total absorption of the spirit by the object. Alba has studied Fine Arts at Universitat de Barcelona and at École Supérieure d’Art & de Design Marseille-Méditerranée. Her work has been exhibited in both Marseille and Mallorca.

Through her paintings, she searches for a temporal loss, for the renunciation of time — to sink into the non-time of the pigments. Her project during the residency at the Fish Factory has focused on the materiality of painting. With this interest in the material relation between painting and support, she then produced a series of works about almost-shapes. Forms with a certain deviation.

Here, she has also reinitiated a project which has been on hold, in which she takes the notion of isolation in a literal way. She actualized sculptures where the viewer is enveloped, surrounded, by the painting. Thank you, Alba! :)

// More of Alba’s work! //

@albasuau

albasuau.com

Ingrid Gaier is a painter, textile designer and filmmaker based in Vienna, Austria. She is interested in poetry and finding images of this sort of written expression. Her first poetry film was about a poem by Jewish writer Rose Ausländer.

She has spent her time here at the Fish Factory working on a new animation about Melitta Grünbaum, wife of the composer Victor Urbancic. They have both fled from Austria because of the Holocaust in Central Europe and managed to settle in Iceland in late 1938. She was a sculptor, philosopher and poetry writer and when she died in Reykjavik in 1984 she left behind a voluminous oeuvre of German-language poetry, a selection of which appeared in the 2014 bilingual Icelandic-German book Frá hjara veraldar.

Ingrid wanted to explore the surroundings and landscape of Iceland, a land that saved Melitta. Her working process here was creating images according to Melitta’s poems, which she then transferred into an animation film. She has spent a lot of her time here going on long walks to the nearby fjords and up the mountain. Thank you, Ingrid!

// More of Ingrid’s work //

http://www.ingrid-gaier.at/

Check out the interview here!

Erin Conyers is a ceramic and mixed media artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her BFA in ceramics at The Kansas City Art Institute in 2019. She enjoys working intuitively with clay, building sculptural vessels that describe different emotions or beliefs that are often not talked about. For her, building with clay has always been a way to understand her feelings when they haven’t been processed or even identified yet. Most of her works have been about trying to find balance within the imbalances life throws at us or finding growth through constant movement.

Working with ceramic materials and mixed media, Erin focuses on environmental issues, capturing the effects of people’s relationships, living and existing within our environment. Erin is also incredibly passionate about pursuing a completely sustainable and waste-free lifestyle as well as community activism and organization. She recreates objects of contemporary conveniences like plastic, single-use water bottles and modern medical packaging. She emulates industrial processes, such as mold making, that are used to mass-produce cheap goods, allowing her to create individual replications of objects. She fills these molds with ceramic materials from studio excess and waste.

However, the vessels she made in Iceland were about finding growth through prolonged periods of stillness. In Iceland, she took a minimalist approach, something she had never done before. She noticed how everything around her was so huge, complex and vast, yet simultaneously so simple and easy. She didn’t want to make anything that took away from the wonderland spirit of the island and chose to make a series that would fit into the landscape and become a part of it. What came from her time living in Iceland was a series of vessels called Breathing Vessels. The solitude of living in a secluded fjord in Iceland gave her the opportunity to focus inwards and create work about the simple yet complex motions of moving the breath through the body. Thank you, Erin!

// More of Erin’s work //

https://www.erinconyers.com/

Check out the interview! :)