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! :)
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! :)
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! :)
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!
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!
Margaux Halloran is a New York-based artist from the United States where she studies fine art at Parsons School of Design. She stayed at the Fish Factory for the month of March where she experimented with oil painting and sculptural works centered around the construction of existing and non-existing structures, and grids. Her project here was to create installation work directly influenced by the natural terrain, and population of Iceland.
In totality, her practice has been motivated by people and their natural allure towards gatherings – such as, an abundance of something in one place, a grouping of mass, faith, ritualistic expressions, existence in the digital world, sexual desire.
She was interested in finding the meeting point between bodies and the natural world. How do people enact agency in themselves and others when surrounded by emptiness? How does the landscape change gatherings? What is the human footprint in a primitive landscape?
Constantine Blintzios is a Greek/British writer. He has a background in music and Contemporary Art and holds an Mst in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. He is primarily a writer of fiction with a focus on the lyric and its’ transformative qualities in prose. He writes about bestiaries and the way emotions can be articulated in the shapes of animals. He is interested in the deep topography of backwoods, backwaters, hinterlands and how history resonates; haunting those that live in neglected and in-between realms. He has had poetry, short stories and reviews published in journals such as Visual Verse, Ash magazine, Paris Lit-Up, the Oxonian Review and the Literary Review. His poem ‘Where I am From’ was shortlisted for the 2017 Martin Starkie awards, he was long-listed for the 2019 DISQUIET fiction prize. As of 2021, his manuscript was longlisted for the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize. His debut novel: The Smoke is me, Burning will be published in 2022 by KERNPUNKT Press.
Constantine Blintzios
He came to the Fish Factory in February 2021. For most of his time here, he worked on a draft for the beginning of his second lyric novel which is inspired by a variety of myths concerning sirens in a setting that draws heavily on the Icelandic landscape and atmosphere.
Sara Sonas is a visual artist who explores materials in relation to their physicality and tactility.
When constructing works, she perceives herself as a receptor; interacting between her environmental and material surroundings while reflecting on existence, transience and our relationship to nature. Observing, analyzing and responding to daily life through dialogue with nature, she reinstates the concept of cyclicity, aiming to find balance and harmony within her work.
During her residency at Fish Factory in November 2020, Sara utilized the spaciousness of the Icelandic landscape to allow her to reflect on the subjects of time, patience and disappearance. Observing ice, she mapped and documented its forms, textures and transmutations through time, with each ice shard representing its own living and changing ‘territory’ for exploration.
Following the transformation of sturdiness towards fragility within the ice, she examined how those characteristics and forms correspond within a different natural material – clay.
Relating to the architectural environment, she juxtaposed our natural ‘landspaces’ – landscaped reliefs (the outdoors) and little corrugated houses (the indoors) by placing them in a micro-perspective, aiming to break the disillusionment that those two worlds are separate.
Marloes Staal is a visual artist from The Netherlands. She graduated in 2014 with a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) at the AKI-Artez University of the Arts in Enschede, and finished a one year post-graduate course in 2017 at the Academie in Rotterdam. From 2013 until 2018 she has been a founding member and curator at The Robson ateliers and has worked as an art-education teacher in museums since 2015. Her mainly sculptural work explores our mental and physical relationship with the environment, rooted in ecology, anthropology and craftsmanship.
She has spent October of 2020 at the Fish Factory Creative Centre and was working on two different art projects, both based on the unique landscape of Iceland: its young and still active geological formation and the melting Vatnajökull glacier.
The work ‘Stones: a work in Progress’ consists of 6 stones and 6 types of wild clay from different areas in Iceland. She processed each clay into a slip that casts each of the stones in plaster molds, creating a colorful representation of its geological past while exploring the meaning of deep time in our human narrative and emphasizing the vulnerability of the landscape in creating fragile ceramic pieces.
Her second art project, ‘Third Nature: Walking on Thin Ice’ is an exact replica of an iceblock, broken off from the Vatnajökull glacier and washed ashore at the Breiðamerkursandur, famously known as Diamond Beach. This replica – made with a silicone mold of the original, filled with water and frozen – is a futile and ironic attempt to preserve a small piece of this magnificent glacier for future generations, only to see it meld away again as a museum piece.
Both art projects are an investigation of the consequences of climate change on the landscape and a reflection on the human instrumentalization of nature.
During her stay, she spent most of her time in the ceramics workplace, going on long hikes in the mountains surrounding the Fish Factory, and traveling. She went to the boiling mud pools and lava fields surrounding Krafla in the north and spent some days around to the Vatnajökull in the south, where she gathered clay, stones and the little icebergs.
