Joke Noordstrand, a Dutch historian and a visual artist, is redefining the narrative of history through her ceramic art, focusing on the often-overlooked stories of women. Her project, “Female History in Iceland,” undertaken at the AiR Fish Factory in Stöðvarfjörður, draws from her fascination with Iceland’s stark landscapes and the rich histories of Icelandic women across generations.

Through engaging conversations and questionnaires, Noordstrand captures the essence of women’s experiences, translating them into ceramics that highlight themes of connection, protection, and resilience. Her innovative techniques range from using common clay and balloon molds to spraying clay to create unique textures. To work more sustainably, she adds leftovers as coffee grounds to the clay and usually combines the bisque and the glaze in one single firing.

From the rugged beauty of the Icelandic landscape to the intimate stories shared by women, Joke’s work captures the essence of female history with sensitivity and insight. Her art invites viewers to ponder the hidden narratives and untold stories that shape our understanding of the past and present.

Joke Noordstrand

www.noordstrand.art

Instagram: jokenoordstrand

Alex M. Stein is an award winning writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Alex stayed at the Fish Factory in November 2024. Alex wrote short stories and shared them at our exhibition at the end of the month in the green room upstairs. During the month, he delighted us with positive energy and good vibes. Pleasure to have you with us in Stöðvarfjörður.

He has devoted his entire adult life to stories and storytelling and is a mainstay of the Los Angeles storytelling community. He ran a weekly storytelling show for two years. He has won the Moth multiple times and is the author of the personal essay collection No, Mr. Bond, I Expect Your Dreams To Die and the short-story collection Tales From the Trail: Short Fiction About Dogs, Mushing, and Sled-Dog Races. He has worked extensively in film and television development and works as a story consultant for production companies, studios, individual writers, and more.

Alex enjoys writing about himself in the third-person and would love it if you connect with him on Twitter (while it still exists) or on Facebook, Post.News, or Mastodon.

Thank you, Alex! :)

Clio Berta is a Maine based performance artist, composer and event producer inspired by snakes, esoteric mysticism, constructed identity, cycles and nothingness. She works with movement, projected video, paint and the natural landscape to explore these ideas in an intimate, multi dimensional way.

Clio spent her time at the Fish Factory researching, writing about and visually investigating the ancient Celtic idea of thin places, simulating rainbows, writing and recording songs, dancing, looking for sparkly rocks and illustrating the elusive spirits that give life to the otherworldly landscape surrounding the Factory.

Visit Clio’s website for more! https://www.clioberta.com/

Thanks, Clio! :)

Thank you Jane!

Nancy is a Professor of Environmental History at Michigan Technological University. She is the author of five books on climate history, Great Lakes history, forest and wetland history, and toxics history.

Nancy spent the month of September with us while she worked on her paintings, watercolours, linocuts, prints and collages. She experimented with these different mediums, inspired by nature and our surroundings. Nancy took many paths up the fjord, looking for different birds and reindeer, and a big herd appeared at the base of the hill in the last week of September.

http://www.nancylangston.net/

Thank you, Nancy! :)

Lula Asplund is a Chicago based sound artist and musician who combines digital and analog sound synthesis with tape manipulation, field recordings, and vocal manipulation in her practice.

Lula’s time at Fish Factory consisted of going on long walks, taking photographs, field recordings, recording electro-magnetic sounds of the lighthouses, reading Clarice Lispector, and recording with sounds from the Juno synthesizer and piano in Studio Silo. She loved taking long bike rides along the coast and visiting the orange lighthouse and found the ethereal landscape and the fog in Stöðvarfjörður incredibly inspiring for her music.

Visit Lula’s bandcamp for more of her work!

https://lulaa.bandcamp.com/

And her instagram!

Thanks, Lula! :)

Madeleine Aleman is a visual artist from Malmö, Sweden. She stayed with us in the month of September 2023. Since 2012, her art practice focuses mainly on drawing, printmaking, and performance. Aleman is strongly influenced by psychology and spirituality. Hypnagogic states and dreams are important sources of inspiration.

“During my residency stay, I was totally overwhelmed by the mountains, the clouds, and the fjord. In the studio, I worked with printmaking and made monotypes.

I used a method in which I painted directly on the printing plate. The result from one print is what brought the process forward, as I kept painting on the same plate without cleaning it in between prints. What’s left of the old print has formed traces of the past in the ones that follow. Like memories. Like dreams. A way to search beyond and dare to get lost.”

Visit Madeleine’s website:

www.aleman.se

and her Instagram:

@madeleinealeman

Thank you, Madeleine! :)

Susan Singer is a writer and an artist. The first time she landed in Keflavik was in 2014. That inspired her to sign up for different residencies, where she worked with photography and with pastels. At the Fish Factory, she experimented with watercolour, and she worked plein air as much as possible, taking inspiration from beautiful surroundings.

“I arrived not knowing what I would do during my month at the Fish Factory, but, within hours, I was settling in creating art unlike anything I’d ever done before. I have always worked super-realistically, but at the Fish Factory this month, I moved towards abstraction.

I began to parse the complexities of Icelandic landscapes into lines and angles and compositions. I moved into a very meditative space and worked in the spirit of the stillness and silence of the Icelandic Nature. I’m so grateful for the time I had there to explore this new direction and for the beauty of the setting to give me so much more to paint!”

Visit her instagram and her facebook for more of her work!

Thank you, Susan! :)

Kathryn Mohr is an artist and a musician currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent the month August here at the Fish Factory, working on music. She set up a desk in our green room upstairs, with beautiful view over the opening of the fjord.

Kathryn liked to stroll near the sea, searching and collecting various objects that were washed ashore. She used them to build interesting sculptures and collections.

Visit her instagram kathryn__mohr

& check her bandcamp

https://kathrynmohr.bandcamp.com/album/holly

Thanks, Kathryn!

Eva is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Barcelona, Spain.

Her work during the residency, in August, was inspired by the local fauna and landscape with a layer of fantasy extracted from Icelandic folk tales mixed with witchy popular culture and personal anecdotes of her travels. She also took the opportunity given to focus on improving her watercolour skills, so the majority of her paintings were done using this medium.

“I found it particularly satisfying discovering how much the setting influenced my capacity to focus, be productive and creative, even when I came with no goals in mind”.

You can see more of her work on instagram: kitara22

and on her website: https://www.behance.net/caldas

Thanks, Eva!

Julia Hechtman is a visual artist who lives and works in Boston, USA. Julia makes works focusing on the balance of absence and presence, life and death, and real-time and memoried experience in her multi-faceted studio practice. The natural world features prominently in her works, which has allowed her to travel extensively and to contemplate the familiar in new ways. In 2019, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Reykjavik at Lístaháskolí Íslands, where she pursued her research into the roles of landscape and memory in identity production. In 2024, she will be going to Svalbard on a two-week residency on a tall ship.

Julia stayed with us in the month of August 2023, while she continued her project “Not Once,” a series of videos based on stories told by local icelanders regarding specific locations of significance. Julia travelled between fjords and interviewed locals who were willing to share their stories and memories from the past. At midday, she wandered along the beaches and docks, accompanied by Tumi, looking for and filming jellyfish. That’s how the project “Apparitions” came to life.

Julia also worked in our ceramics workshop, sculpting birds out of clay. “Spirit Birds,” they’re called, and they were an inspiration for fellow artist Gabriele Glang’s ceramis birds.

Julia also travelled to Reykjavik, where she had an audio-visual exhibition of her project.

Visit Julia’s website for more of her work: https://www.juliahechtman.com/

https://vimeo.com/juliahechtman

Thanks, Julia! :)

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! :)