Lilien Li is an artist from Hong Kong who celebrated her graduation from the University of Edinburgh and RMIT University with a two-month artist residency retreat. Lilien engages in her practice articulating contemporary context with her focus on the perception of time/space. While she collaborates with multi-medium, her works are transforming her temporal, spatial and cultural sensitivities into diverse forms of art, including installation and conceptual pieces. Her works have been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong, Scotland, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan.
During her residency, Lilien spent most of her time in the Icelandic landscape. With an interest in phenomenology, she attempted to magnify her sensation of time/space through immersing into nature. She developed a photographic series informed by walking and installations, reflecting on her surrounding and personal situations.
Jo is a musician based in Berlin (DEU). She puzzles crooked tone songs from field recordings. In each of her songs she deeply steps into the world of her sound sources and discovers her own musical terrain by falling in love with hidden and dirty sounds, shaping them sensitively and developing a unique feeling for combining them.
Jo has a strong connection to Iceland. Here, she began her musical project during a trip in 2017, simply because she was not in the mood to shoot stunning Icelandic landscape photos. Instead, she recorded sounds and travelled Iceland with her ears to make one song out of the sounds.
Unexpectedly, Jo has made many more songs since then, released them, and has started to perform her music on stage. For live performances, Jo developed the glasambel. This unique instrument allows her to present her music in her very own way.
Annika Kiiskilä is a visual artist and comic author based in Tampere, Finland. They graduated from Kankaanpää art school with a Bachelor of Arts in 2014, and have since worked as an independent artist, as well as a gallery assistant and printmaker in Gallery Himmelblau.
Annika has been drawing creatures, characters and comics since childhood, and during the last few years has finally followed their dream of doing it fulltime. They have self-published short and long comics both as webcomics and as printed zines, and now they are working on their first full-length graphic novel, which they hope to pitch to publishers in the near future.
While at the Fish Factory, Annika worked on concept art and finalising character concepts for their graphic novel. They also worked on several short comics for their next self-published zine, which will be an illustrated short story collection of sorts. Annika also took advantage of the Fish Factory’s printmaking studio and worked on lino cut for the first time since their graduation!
Nature, folklore and mythology have always been close to Annika’s heart, and she has always wanted to experience the magic of Iceland – a country so similar yet so different from Finland. Being able to come to Iceland and work on their art in a residency studio was a double dream come true to Annika.
Paul Belenky lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brandeis University in 2014 with dual bachelor’s degrees in biology and studio art. He completed his MFA at MassArt in 2017 and spent the next two years teaching visual art in elementary school. Paul lives life in the pursuit of a state of a specific kind of “trolling” surreality because to him, absurdity and play often approach the truth more closely than reality. Paul works in installation, drawing, and sculpture, and aspires to make work that draws both smiles and grimaces.
While at the Fish Factory Paul explored a variety of mediums and process and used the time to research new ideas and motifs to inspire his practice going forward. Paul worked with blueprints found during a previous residency. Drawing false stupid ideas about reinserting chickens into eggs or recycling sausages into pigs over the original designs, Paul would imagine humour and absurdity in the normally mundane technical drawings. Using industrial leftovers from the Fish Factory and on occasion also some leftover fish, Paul would also build mock machines inspired by the blueprint drawings.
Using the time, space and facilities provided by residency Paul also experiment with collagraph printmaking on paper and ceramics, creating a series of prints and tiles inspired by Iceland’s most famous food mascot, the bonus pig. In his first month in the residency, Paul also worked with fellow resident Elle Dioguardi on a collaborative sculpture made from found objects in the factory.
Bea May Lucas is a visual artist living and working in the UK. She specializes in figurative paintings, the content of which blurs the lines between reality and fiction, encapsulating the viewer in her imagination. She is interested in animals and animal-human interactions – a relationship between separate species. Her keen interest in animals and animal instincts comes forward within her paintings. Her line of inquiry includes how humans are extremely animistic in many ways. She uses past events and experiences, including emotions she has felt, as source material for her work. Intuitively the work is from a female perspective focusing on how it feels to be a woman; in this sense, her artworks are largely autobiographical. She creates her own world within paintings and uses animal and human characters, representative of different elements of her psyche, to deliver her concepts to her audience.
Bea’s practise consists mainly of large-scale oil paintings on gesso- primed canvas, however, she also builds concepts within the work using a variety of different mediums, on varied surfaces. This includes paintings using oils and acrylic paints on paper, charcoal drawings, ink pen illustrations and murals. She established the loose, direct language of her large-scale oil paintings by reflecting on the way she works quickly on paper in acrylic in a drawing style. She uses many vibrant and vivid colours such as scarlets, pinks, and greens, however, despite her colour choices, the impact of her large-scale works are harmonious instead of chaotic.
Bea likes to think that the viewer has a relationship toward these works because there is a connection towards their own mythology. She wants to express her feelings and views to her audience, and she aims for the viewer to be impacted by her artworks because they can relate to the emotions which are on the animals’ faces. She aims for the viewer to feel a personal relation to her paintings influenced by symbolism within the material.
Diane Drubay is a visual artist who uses the psychoactive effect of colours and the construction of landscapes to awaken emotions, sensations and awareness of nature.
Diane Dubray // February 2020
During her residency, she focused on the colours of Iceland in the depths of winter in February through photography, telling the story of a future unfolding before our eyes every day. The series “SO2” is a photographic report of the landscapes in Stöðvarfjörður at a time when anthropogenic global warming changed the colours and the composition of our atmosphere. Her second series of photographies “Futurum Uelut” is a series where interfering colours captured in nature create a fantasized reality in a distant future.
Seán Cotter is a visual artist living and working in Ireland. He is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design inDublin, and has attended residencies in Ireland, Finland, Iceland and Germany. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland as well as abroad, and is engaged with the artistic community locally, nationally, and internationally., and has attended residencies in Ireland, Finland, Iceland and Germany. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland as well as abroad, and is engaged with the artistic community locally, nationally, and internationally.
In Seán’s work, landscapes serve as metaphors for life and its dramas, whether in turmoil or at peace. Wide-open spaces are able to be contained by a few well placed lines, and emulate the constraints of the modern world, or a persons desire to contain and control their own immediate emotional environment. Blurring the boundaries between areas of light and dark can recall the sometimes difficult choices that are neither right nor wrong.
Elle DioGuardi is a visual artist living and working in Boston, MA, USA. She graduated with a BFA from the New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University in 2015. Since then, she has continued her studio practice, showing her work around Boston, Cambridge, and New York, and working as a professional photographer, photo archivist, and studio assistant.
Elle’s goal as an artist is to connect with viewers on an emotional level, by providing a lens through which they can examine their own world. She achieves this by creating works that physically confront the viewer, usually with their own reflection, combined with a text phrase. These works vary from intimate mirror pieces where the reflective surface is etched away by hand, to small sticker installations, to installation pieces made of mylar that confront the viewer on a much larger scale.
During her time at Fish Factory Creative Center, Elle set out to create more of these large-scale installation pieces. She used the beginning of her time at the Fish Factory to work on the content of her text phrases and to hike around the area in search of installation locations. The incredible landscape of Stöðvarfjörður lends itself especially well as a backdrop for installation work, and the collaborative nature of the residency was a privilege to be a part of. On more than one occasion, other artists in the residency assisted Elle in her installation and documentation of work. Elle also worked with fellow resident Paul Belenky on a collaborative sculpture made from found objects in the factory.
