Lise Borel is French composer and singer living in Paris. She teaches composition at Radio France Professional Children Choir and has written for musicians such as Yo-Yo Ma, Philippe Jaroussky, El Sistema Orchestra… Her pieces were performed in Notre Dame, Théâtre des Champs Élysées, the Eiffel Tower… Lise also sings her own compostions : she likes to write music that talks to the senses and allows the heart to travel and wonder.
Her time in Fish Factory was very interesting in many dimensions. On an artistic aspect, she got inspired by the astonishing nature surrounding her, the different Islandic traditions and the unique atmosphere of a winter month.
Thanks to this long time stay she was able to write many songs, poems and classical pieces. On a human level, meeting the team and the other artists was extremely nurrishing and created some wonderful interractions that marked her practice and her heart.
Martina Solárová Pauleová is visual artist from Slovakia. She loves nature,art and people.
I was happy finding this combo in Iceland,at residency Fish Factory. Here I work on project Flying Time. Flying like a fish-bird?
And then I developed that theme using different materials and meanings.
Each piece extends the narrative, shifting between the personal and the universal, the tangible and the imagined. The delicate lines and wrinkles of my own eyes begin to mirror the surrounding landscape, as if the body itself were a terrain—marked, shaped, and continuously rewritten by time and memory.
Joel Crosswell is a contemporary artist from Tasmania, Australia. While drawing and sculpture often form the foundation of his practice, his artistic process is highly exploratory, with a broad and evolving material language.
His work frequently traverses themes of identity, the human condition, and the metaphysical, with an affinity for figurative work and narrative-driven forms.
“The Fish Factory residency enabled solid time in the studio which allowed me to create a new body of work for exhibition. I enjoyed the remote location on the east coast, in Stöðvarfjörður. The landscape and old stories were key influences in my work and will continue to inform my practice in a range of different ways moving forward”
Alix McIntosh is a photographer based in Edinburgh. Her work explores landscape and the quiet traces of human presence within everyday spaces and environments.
I came to the Fish Factory wanting to slow down and make work away from the pace of everyday life. The winter landscape and shifting weather shaped my days around walking different trails, sometimes returning to the same routes to see how things had changed, observing and photographing what I found along the way.
Through these daily walks I began to notice how forms in nature echoed one another: transparent layers of ice forming, patterns in rock, weather moving across the land and textures appearing and disappearing with changing conditions. I was also drawn to the quiet traces of human presence around Stöðvarfjörður during the winter months.
Alongside the photography I experimented with other ways of making, including working in the darkroom, collage, watercolour and throwing pots in the ceramics studio. I also collaborated with another resident on a short video piece using field recordings and underwater filming. It was an incredible experience and opportunity to spend time with artists from different parts of the world and with the team at the Fish Factory.
Kajsa Wingerup is a Swedish-American visual artist with a speciality in portrait photography. During her Photography B/A in Edinburgh, her long-term documentary and fine art projects explored themes of identity, strength, and vulnerability, focusing primarily on small niche communities with diverse subjects and exploring the layers that make up their personalities.
Her time at Fish Factory was spent collaborating with a few of the other artists to create portrait work inspired by the environment and the collaborating artists’ creative expression.
In addition, she explored self-portraiture and made connections with local fishermen to document a piece of their lives working in the East Fjords. Her work seeks to go beyond mere visual representation; she aims to bring out the depth and complexity of each individual, telling their story through subtle nuances in expression, body language, and light.
Emma Todd is an installation artist from Virginia, USA, working with multilayered, phenomenological, and playful approaches to space-making.
As part of the November artist residency, she spent a transitional winter period incubating in eastern Iceland, in its beautiful, complex landscape where a poignant sense of isolation paired with a warm togetherness at the Fish Factory.
Building on a developing line of artistic research, she experimented with micro-phenomenological methods by holding interviews with fellow residents. In these interviews, together they closely recapped moments of how the interviewees’ subjective experience unfolded in sensory, cognitive, attentional, emotional, bodily qualities in relation to an art installation.
They delved into experiential details of their moments with the installation. For example, orientation and surrounding affecting feelings of safety, feelings of being home, fragility, being guided by the installation, expectations for modes of interaction, calm, inrigue, getting in touch with the environment and wave sounds, feelings of softness of the beach, and so on.
Interview Excerpt 1: Interviewer: So, there’s similar feelings at your beach at home that this enclosure brought you back to. How, I guess, how are you are you remembering or thinking or feeling the sense of home, like, how does that come up specifically while you’re at this beach here?
Interviewee: It was like a feeling in my body, it was like a feeling of my body, like, remembering something because of the elements around it. It was not necessarily, like, in my head.
Interview Excerpt 2: Interviewer: So the sounds of the ocean feel intense because of, like, the danger, like, this sense of: wow, there’s sea behind me in the position I’m in. [Interviewee: Yeah]. Were these thoughts that you were having, or is it more of a general sense of that intensity?
Interviewee: I think it was a sensation. And it was a sensation, and then I tried to understand. Then I tried to understand: why do I feel that way? So, so, I couldn’t describe it. So I was, like, first I was feeling something, and then I was like: what is this?
Other artworks emerged as her practice fell into new rhythms that were set by the landscape: the rising and setting sun, and spending time with the sea and its patterns of take and return.
Alex Tam is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Colorado but calls sunny Los Angeles home now. He works mainly in digital forms such as photography and graphic design and most recently has found great fulfilment working in the physical medium of clay. He spends most of his time on the wheel exploring various closed and open forms from plates to bowls to jars. Vases, however, are what he gravitates most towards as it allows for more experimentation and play with shapes and glazing. During his stay, he focused on exploring his relationship with clay and form even further.
I came to the Fish Factory not really having a solid plan other than simply trusting the process. I let my intuition and the wonderful stillness I found from being in this breathtaking landscape in the winter be my guides. Through spending many late nights on the wheel throwing over and over, I eventually landed on this rounded, tall, almost otherworldly shape I quite liked. As for the glazing, that was inspired less by stillness and more from the constant change and seemingly sometimes random chaos that comes from Icelandic nature.
Ultimately, everything about my time at the Fish Factory inspired me in little ways. Whether it was the energy from the other artists hard at work or fooling around on the guitar while I waited for the kettle to boil, all of it showed up in my pottery in one way or another. Clay really has a way of reflecting your internal state back to you like a mirror and it has memory (quite literally the particles will align how you shape them to and tend to stay that way). The most sentimental part of me would like to imagine that all our ceramic pieces serve not only as a piece of art or functional dinnerware but also as an organic hard drive of sorts, forever holding the memories of its maker within.
Many thanks to my cohort for an amazing month and the Fish Factory for providing an amazing environment and set of tools to run wild with our imagination. The night owl within me will miss being able to throw on the wheel at midnight!
Andrea Cormier is a singer-songwriter based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
During her time at the Fish Factory, Andrea spent her days in Studio Silo where she wrote and recorded new songs for her next album. She also took the opportunity to cut a 7 inch vinyl, make prints in the darkroom, and learn how to do pottery.
Andrea’s music is heavily inspired by nature and she spent much of her time exploring the picturesque landscape of Stöðvarfjörður, studying the land and the birds, collecting rocks and minerals along the beach and chasing northern lights.
joj (they/them @jojthefirst) is a France-based American nonbinary writer of creative nonfiction. They are a self-described collector of underutilized graduate degrees, the most recent (2020) an MA in Creative Writing from Ball State University. Their work explores themes of place, class, queerness, parenthood, infant loss, plant medicine, and the nomadic/peripatetic. Their writing has appeared in Insider, Parents, Yes!, Five Minutes, and The Matador Network. While at Fish Factory, they worked on LIKE SHELLIN’ PEAS, a memoir about being a teenage birthmother, a work that celebrates choice and alternative family construction. But beyond that, their time at Fish Factory became a renaissance of their love for experimentation, adventure, and honest vulnerability.
“I went to Fish Factory to revise a birthmother narrative I wrote over a decade ago. And I did make great strides on that project. But the way the late winter sunlight hits the snow and water and rocks in Stödvarfjördur… it became a siren song, drawing me from my writing cave once a day to stroll along the waves or hike up into the mountain to watch snowstorms move across the waves below. And any time my writing energy waned, there were generous, patiently-instructive fellow artists eager to share their skills and processes–I learned how to throw clay! My hands made beautiful things out of dirt! They photographed, filmed, and cheered as I plunged into the freezing arctic brine! And, I felt so held, supported, and enabled by the Fish Factory crew that I now see them as chosen family. I definitely left a fat chunk of my heart in Stödvarfjördur.”
I attended the Fish Factory Artist residency with the intention of interviewing people about how they balance caring for the earth and taking care of themselves. I then planned to write essays and create art in response to the interviews.
All of that happened, but my project doesn’t even begin to capture the vastness of my experience at the Fish Factory. I was filled with wonder by the factory and its magical rooms where I never knew what I would find. The residency attracted a group of artists that were equally magical. I was continually in awe of their bold, creative, and playful projects. Moreso, I was deeply touched by the humanity, imagination, and soulfulness of my cohort members. I felt especially lucky that I was able to interview them individually and talk about matters we all wrestle with.
Every day I was at the residency, I found myself expanding more and more into the person I want to be, as well as how I want to live my life and show up in the world. I became more playful, joyful, and grounded. I felt alive and connected in ways that I carry deep in my soul now.
While at the residency, I created an entire body of work that I deeply cherish. It includes 15 essays and over 100 pieces of art (and more to come!). However, it is my time, experiences, and connections with the people there that impacted me the most. I am a more rooted person who now sees different, wonderful possibilities for myself because of the Fish Factory.
Here is a link to my essays (which are also paired with artwork):
Eve Gittins is multidisciplinary visual artist, who is currently studying a masters in animation at the School of Digital Art in Manchester, England. Working with tactile mediums her artistic outlet over the last few years has taken the form of paper mache masks. Eves’s focus has now sized down, as she focuses on puppetry and stop motion animation for a short, experimental film which will be released later this year. Working with themes of folklore, feminine identity and the male gaze to produce an otherworldly, bizarre and freakish delight for the eyes and ears.
August 2025 was Eve’s second visit to the Fish Factory, she used the time as an intense pre-production period for her film. Working on her stop motion puppet, concept art and a live action segment of the film which the other artists kindly helped with up in the hills. Her first visit back in 2023 inspired her current project, so revisiting to work on the film felt like an amazing opportunity. Using the idyllic landscape for inspiration and being a consistent reminder of our inherent connection to nature helped ground her project.
“The studio and the artists I shared it with was the perfect space to focus on my film, Kris and Vid were so sweet and accommodating too. It’s a proper passion project. I loved being there during blueberry season as well, free snacks straight from the ground on our hikes was amazing, all hail the Fish Factory!”
Jess Distill is a multi discipline artist and singer/songwriter from England.
Fascinated by sound and texture, Jess’ art is inspired by nature, literature, philosophy, history and the human condition and explores our relationships with each other and the world around us.
Whilst in Iceland, Jess explored the nature around her by collecting sound recordings texture rubbings and macro photos, combining them to create abstract paintings, prints and vast, multi layered soundscapes.
She also took the opportunity to write and record a 3 track ep, which she pressed onto vinyl.
Helena Barnes (b1992) is a painter living in the North East of the Scottish Highlands.
She works primarily in oils and acrylics on panel and unprimed canvas, and is interested in how material behaviour — absorption, layering, removal, and viscosity — can evoke the shifting, unstable, and liminal qualities of landscape. The slowness of oil paint allows her to work with duration; surfaces are built up and eroded over time, mirroring the geological and atmospheric processes that form the terrain itself.
She is fascinated by the alchemy of paint — how emulsion retracts from oil, how acrylic clings on top, how a brush or scraper dipped in white spirit can shift a surface as dramatically as weather reshapes a landscape. This dialogue between material and place underpins her practice, reflecting the instability and richness of the land itself and revealing ‘ghosts’ beneath the painted surface.
During her time at the Fish Factory, she painted largely on the floor, scraping, pulling, pouring, glazing, revealing, layering, scratching, and combining materials in ways that do not always belong together (oil versus water). She forced these materials into a single work in an effort to capture liminal spaces and her surrounding environment.
BEAM is a new kind of climate institution — part creative studio, part research lab, part public imagination engine. Founded by Annie Chen and Zoe Lee, BEAM approaches the climate crisis as both a planetary emergency and a cultural inflection point—one that demands new connective tissue between science, technology, ecology, and society. Their work investigates how emerging technologies meet lived context, how communities build power and agency, and how shared imaginaries shape the futures people are willing to work toward.
BEAM partners with science-led and climate-action organizations to translate complex work into clarity — building tools, public narratives, and impact campaigns that turn research into something people can understand, trust, and act on. Drawing from expertise in biology, behavioral decision sciences, and design, BEAM brings interdisciplinary fluency and sociotechnical expertise to collaborations spanning ocean restoration, biotechnology, community resilience, and climate governance.
BEAM’s work has been supported by NEW INC, The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Interlace Fund, UNESCO Ocean Decade, MIT Open Documentary Lab, and a wide ecosystem of blue-sector collaborators.
EXPERIENCE + WORK @ FISH FACTORY
We spent our residency at Fish Factory working on TIDELANDS, a game and film about coastal futures on the U.S. East Coast. We brought part of our team—Annie, Zoe, Ellen, and Ryan—to Stöðvarfjörður to focus on the project and push it to the next phase of development.
Most days were spent worldbuilding: research on the aquaculture systems and low-fi solarpunk technologies of the New Alchemists of the ‘70s, making a big map of the Rhode Island coastline, painting, filming, recording sound, prototyping in Unreal, cooking a lot, and wandering around the surrounding landscape. Being in a place so intimately tied to fish (literally!) and water shaped how we thought about community, place, and change.
We met people from town, filmed local band Sarasótt, and got to be there for the inauguration of Fish Factory as a cultural center in the Eastfjords. Mostly, it was just a generous, grounding place to think, make, and be together. We miss Fish Factory already, and hope to return soon <3
Janine van Veen is an artist from the Netherlands who works with video and performance art. She was an artist-in-residence in September 2025.
“I went to Iceland with my own polka-dotted van (for those interested: inspired by Pippi Longstocking’s horse and the work of Yayoi Kusama). After one week of slow traveling, I arrived at the Fish Factory Creative Centre in Stöðvarfjörður. The Fish Factory became my home base.
I work with my body in dialogue with the landscape, so at the beginning of the residency I researched potential film locations. I received helpful tips about the surroundings and did location scouting both by van and on foot. Wanting to make the most of my time in Iceland, I created an extensive overview plan using all the collected input for my video ideas.
During the following weeks, I monitored the weather several times a day – rain, wind, sun, tides. I knew exactly which type of weather I needed for each video, with which camera, costume and location. When the moment was right, I went out to film; when it wasn’t, I returned and tried again another day. In between, I worked at the sewing machine or in the metal workshop.
Some casual moments: I met three visiting volcanologists who told me about a unique magma mountain they were researching; it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. To get there, I walked for three hours with all my gear to launch a drone from a steep magma slope with rolling stones, where I lost my drone and later found it again. Because I wasn’t in the shot, I made this six-hour trip twice. I sanded a large saw for hours until it produced sound, dragged my 30-meter-long red dress up a mountain, screamed at growling landscapes, and felt sick after tumbling on a black sand beach – ending up lying down while half naked young men did a photoshoot in front of my parked van. I danced wildly with my fellow residents on several evenings, sang musical theatre songs at karaoke, shared meals, and exchanged inspiration, inner necessity and life experiences.
My time in Iceland was an adventure, and I loved every second of it.
My artistic research was partly about loneliness but what I found was connection, with my fellow artists and with the land(scape). Without the facilities and people at this residency, I would not have been able to create the seven videos I made. I am deeply grateful for this experience.”
Eleanor Sykes is an illustrator and author based in Scotland. Working predominantly with mixed media on paper, she brings together themes of traditional folk practice and childhood imagination through her storytelling imagery.
She spent her residency filling a small collection of empty sketchbooks with quick and intuitive drawings that were inspired by an entirely new way of existing, making the shift from working and living in the city to the quietness of Stöðvarfjörður.
Embracing the humanness of being slow and surrounded by nature, local folklore and tradition became present in her illustrations and reflected her experience of childhood within the experience of inhabiting somewhere new and beautiful.
Jane Affleck is a is a writer and artist based in Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island (PEI), which is on the east coast of Canada and part of Mi’kma’ki, the unceeded lands of the Mi’kmaq people. Jane has taught undergrad-level writing, English lit, and art history courses. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The Great Lakes Review, feral feminisms, Taproot, C Magazine, and Visual Arts News. Jane has received grants to support various academic, research-creation, and art or writing projects, including most recently from PEI Arts Grants to support the residency at Fish Factory. They have also been shortlisted for several writing prizes, including first prize in the creative non-fiction category in the PEI Writers’ Guild’s Island Literary Awards in 2023. Her ink and watercolour drawings have been in group exhibitions across Canada and online.
“June 2025 was my second residency at Fish Factory — exactly 8 years since the first. But the fjord, the village, and Fish Factory were all much as I remembered them (though several renovation projects have changed the building a bit!). Some of the mountains showed only a little wear and tear at the very tops (at heights I’d not dared to climb even when younger), but the moss, the crowberries, the willow, the flowering plants, and the whimbrels, snipes, wagtails, eider ducks, and terns — all were whole-heartedly busy with their own summertime creative processes of growing and nesting and blooming. So Fish Factory was again the perfect setting for the intensive focus required to finish a draft of a complex project.
The quiet studios in the village surrounded by myriad forms of life on the mountains provided daily antidote to the challenges of writing a long-form work crossing genres of dystopia, climate fiction (cli-fi), and solar punk (it’s really a thing!), and with themes that include gender-based violence… And after returning home, my time in Fish Factory inspired a short zine project called Júní / June, which contrasts the peacefulness of the east fjords with the bombings that happened that month in Iran.
Takk fyrir to Kris and Vid and everyone else at Fish Factory for such an amazing month — hope to see you all again before another 8 years goes by!”
Montana van Duijn is a Maine based artist who interacts with her world through performance, video, and natural landscapes. Her work is based around finding her spirituality through the connection she can find through body based contact to the natural world. This is often shown through video based pieces, and installations.
During her time at Fish Factory van Duijn focused more on her illustration based skills, creating a set of “Divinity cards” that act as a way to visually showcase her beliefs, and what she holds dear to her in this life. The cards are a means of processing, sharing, and connecting to her spirituality through a visually based set of “rules”. As well as the Divinity cards, van Duijn created a sound based “album”.
Through old voice memos, voice messages, and collecting sounds from Iceland, she created a soundscape that moves you through the emotions surrounding her breakup with her long term partner, the death of her grandmother and best friend, and the anger that comes from the societies she lives in today. Van Duijn’s skill set for creating music is completely intuitive, and based minimally on practical skill.
Van Duijn found a solace experimenting within this art form, though, and the mountains and waters of Iceland sang through to make way for the album to be created. The final products of van Duijn’s time at Fish Factory were a cohesive album made into a cassette tape, and a full 12 piece deck of Divinity cards.
Nick Wishart is an interdisciplinary artist and musician whose work merges sound, light, and movement. Using custom-built electronic instruments, sensors, and code, he creates immersive performances and installations that transform gesture and environment into audiovisual experiences. His practice explores the boundaries between technology, art, and play.
“I had an incredible time at the Fish Factory residency, where I focused on refining my live set and developing new ideas. A real highlight was performing at the Tiny Church in Stöðvarfjörður. I also captured extensive slow-motion and timelapse footage of the stunning East Icelandic landscape, which I’ve since woven into my audio reactive live visuals.
Thanks for all your hard work helping us with this project!”
Geertje Brandenburg, is a Dutch artist who works with installation, collage, text, and craft.
In artworks built up from her extensive visual archive, Geertje questions the versatility of identity. As someone named after several people Geertje interweaves herself with others, presenting a version of the truth that fluctuates between myth and a half-remembered moment. Geertje’s work is rooted in collage and the archive, photos taken from their original context are combined with text written by the artist herself. Through appropriating materials from the archive and combining them with personal stories Geertje creates a world in which she is both her grandmother and an unknown woman in a photo. Her sister’s dreams become her own, and words written by a stranger become notes in her own diary.
This fluid approach to the autobiographical makes Geertje’s work feel like a dream that you are trying to remember, but can’t quite puzzle together. I spent my time at the Fish Factory reframing my practice – coming from my own familiar studio environment, Stöðvarfjörður and Iceland were a major change – and I responded by walking, observing, searching and finding, then bringing those experiences and found objects back to the sewing machine.
Sewing as a practice/craft has always been one which I banned to the home, a space for myself to relax and make without the pressure of making art. Being so isolated from my own home and studio it actually felt really nice to turn back to this craft in order to create my work. The sounds of the tracing paper being cut, sewn, and built into the sculpture became a soundtrack to my time at the fish factory, merging with the waves crashing into the fjord and the wind carving a patch between the mountains. I’ve been researching the merging of medical and religious rituals, how many religious rituals come from a medical understanding, and how many medical rituals we still use today are actually done in reassurance, not medical necessity. In Iceland I searched for local herbal remedies and religious myths, where do they meet, and where do they diverge?
These findings all come together into this paper gate I spent my month sewing, an architectural element which is made to sever, but shows both sides of the coin at once.
Madelyn Gowler is a queer, film-based artist focusing on materiality and experimental processes of image making. They are currently residing in the Canadian prairies – Winnipeg, MB and received their BFA from the University of Manitoba. They mainly work with textiles, installation, super 8 film, and analog photography. Their practice focuses on meditative processes of deconstruction, repurposing, and film as subject. Their films have been screened locally and internationally at ‘Engauge Experimental Film Festival’ in Seattle, WA, USA (2023), ‘Experiments in Cinema v18.4’ in Albuquerque, NM, USA (2023), and ‘Saint Bimbo: Film Church No.11’ in Ridgewood, NY, USA. Gowler’s work has been exhibited at Ace Art Inc. (2025) in “Poetics of Light: Experiments in Photography”, MAWA (2025) in “Seamless Transitions”, and the University of Manitoba Collections Gallery (2023) in “Indeterminate Limits”.
The project I was working on at the Fish Factory was a direct animation using 16mm and 35mm film. I started the residency making phytograms on film, which is a process started by Karel Doing – soaking objects in a solution of washing soda and vitamin c powder then placing it on light sensitive materials. I used sea water to mix the solution then soaked rocks, sand, grass, and seaweed, placing it on unexposed 16mm film emulsion. I also taught a phytogram workshop outside with the community using both film and darkroom paper. The group had brought leaves, flowers, sticks, and rocks.
I used previously shot film and my phytogrammed film to etch, collage, draw, write, cut, hole-punch, cyanotype, and stamp onto. I carved lino to mimic the northern lights we’d seen one night. The short clips of text I incorporated were inspired by my stay – “Crunch under the soft bed” was from walking on a moss covered mountain, hearing the crunch and shifting of the eroded rocks beneath. “Lie down for the all encompassing blue” was drawn from being so relaxed gazing upon the blue of the water and lying on the trampoline, looking up at the clear blue sky – the title of my film will be “All Encompassing Blue”
I took field recordings for my film while I was working by the water. The sound of the water running along the rocks was indescribable, sounding kind of like tiny bells chiming all at once. I then layered improvised piano playing overtop of the singing water and rocks. One of my side projects was weaving film and seaweed around rocks I found by the water. I loved playing around with the variety of shapes and colours of the rocks, the different hues of seaweed, and the visuals of the film I had on hand. I also photographed a lot of the town on film, as well as playing around in the ceramic room, experimenting with making whistles. I had managed to make a whistle in the shape of a fish!
Daria, a Ukrainian artist, sketcher, and visual storyteller currently based in Czechia.
My month at the residency felt like an art adventure, a rare chance to fully dive into my practice. Coming from Ukraine, landscapes hold a therapeutic weight for me, and painting them in bold colors became a way to process both movement and memory.
I carried my Fujifilm camera on every hike with fellow residents, capturing moments on both digital and black-and-white film, later developing the rolls in the darkroom.
Evenings were spent editing and retouching footage for my YouTube project, weaving together the day’s sketches and journeys. This balance of studio focus and outdoor exploration grounded me, turning the residency into both creative work and healing.
When I came to the fish factory I had the intention of making a UFO. This sort of happened, but so did lots of other things.
I did a collaboration with Rachel Saxby. I handed over some test videos and we discussed how she could play with the video content, and do as she wanted with it. The results were interesting, and we ended up with an audiovisual composition that somehow works.
While walking around the village, I saw a Mk1 Land Rover, and wished I had one to explore Iceland with. So I decided to make one using my temporary cardboard sculpture technique.
During the build I modified it, mounting it on a computer chair to make it mobile. I spent a few hours a day constructing the Land Rover while thinking, why the hell am I doing this?I couldjust go for a walk or something, but regardless, I continued. To stabilise and hold it together, I used some ratchet straps from the metal workshop.
Now it was time to take it outside, to go exploring. We spun the Land Rover around, discussing what to do with it. We pushed it around and parked it for a while. After more discussion, we took it to a small hill and pushed it down. 1-2-3, action: the Land Rover speeds down the hill, starts to drift, skids. Doink. It collapses on its side. The aerial view shows the action from above and some phone camera footage captures it passing at ground level.
In other news, the UFO was, in some ways, a failure. I’d anticipated taking it deeper into the landscape, but something did happen: the UFO was inflated, and this balloon-type structure was moved around on the pier, almost abducting some participants, swallowing them into a metallic blob. It danced around a bit, then deflated, rolled up and disappeared. All captured by drone pilot in aerial view.
I also made some classic Test videos using a hot water bottle as the subject. I’m still not sure what it means.
To give some context as to what the tests are, they are an ongoing archive of kinetic installations that use various materials and objects as a subject and then record the actions.
Tania Joanna Van Hoofstadt is a Belgian mixed media artist. Originally trained as an architect, she found herself craving more creative freedom—and about 20 years ago, she turned to sculpture and painting.
Since then, her work has evolved into a tactile exploration of texture, color, and material. From moss and lichen to metal scraps and engine parts, she dives into both natural and man-made worlds, zooming in until the smallest details become vast imagined landscapes. Macro photography plays a key role: a thin layer of cambium becomes a canyon; a pebble becomes a planet. Through her collages, installations, and machines, she invites viewers into these miniature universes.
Lately, she’s been capturing new “sceneries” using her handmade Landscape Slicer—a quirky, low-tech alternative to a 360° camera. Not quite efficient, but twice the fun. Because for Tania, playfulness is essential: nothing should ever get too serious.
Her first residency in Iceland, at the Fish Factory, has been everything she hoped for. Surrounded by wild landscapes and shelves stacked with wheels, tubes, and music instrument parts, she felt like she walked into her version of Valhalla.
A new Landscape Slicer was built, and ideas for more gloriously useless machines are already brewing. Maybe during the next residency?
