“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! :)

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?

Thank you, Margaux!

@margauxhalloran
margauxerinhalloran.com

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.

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.

Thank you, Constantine!

Check out the interview here:

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.

Check more of her work on the website:

https://www.sarasonas.com

Thank you, Sara! :)

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.

You can see more of her work on her website http://www.marloesstaal.com/ or IG https://www.instagram.com/marloesstaal/

&

don’t forget to check the interview! :)