Candela Cibrián (aka Fenna Frei) is an Argentine singer-songwriter, music producer and performer based in Mexico City. Her music offers a mysterious take on electronic dream pop, with experimental nuances. Deeply inspired by mythology, symbolism and surrealism, her alter ego Fenna Frei, unfolds into two facets: a Side A, through which she composes and produces experimental pop story-songs wrapped in mystery and a poetic sensitivity, and a Side B (“sigsegv”), more rooted in improvisation and close to IDM, which expresses a critical perspective on technocapitalism in the face of the new demands of the era of automation and dehumanization. In 2025, she was awarded by Ibermúsicas to carry out this residency.

During her stay at Fish Factory, and inspired by the surroundings of Stöðvarfjörður, she decided to develop a four chapter visual EP reflecting on the different stages and facets of love through acts of nature. She composed and produced the songs, and edited the video with footage she captured on her handycam throughout the residency. She also created a music video with resident photographer Rachel Karls, which forms part of the album. The EP “Faces of Love” will be pressed on vinyl, with artwork designed by fellow resident Vivian Gölz.

“As in love, experiencing magic is something that can only be recognized through the body and one’s own consciousness. At the Fish Factory, I felt magic after many years of not having found it. The wonderful and complex feeling of being isolated within a community was also deeply inspiring to me. The Silo studio has so much charm, and that window was my source of energy for 25 days. The entire FF crew is defined by their warmth and excellent willingness to help with anything you may need. I am especially grateful to Lukas for encouraging me creatively and for being part of my music video. I will come back!.”

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dellacibrian/
Website: candelacibrian.com

Baz Laarakkers is a sound artist and composer from Arnhem, The Netherlands. His practice blends field recording, sonic transformation and generative composition, letting sound unfold through both compositional intent and procedural processes. During his stay at the residency Baz joined Laura Nygren mid-month as collaborator in the development of her new work “Glisten”.

Glisten is an artistic research into the materiality of snow and ice. Using field recordings, vocal techniques, and electronics, Laura is developing a body of work around the molecular language of melting. Her research revolves around two questions: How can ephemeral materials express collective resilience? How can we, as artists, resist ecological destruction and fight political apathy? While a single snowflake might vanish instantly, a drift takes days.

Throughout their time together, they adventured up the mountains of Stöðvarfjörður and took an unforgettable trip to the Hoffellsjökull glacier for field recording. Back at the factory, they spent time re-amping samples of snow and ice using Atomic Analog gear and composing from recordings made on the mountain, at the glacier, and around the factory. The results will eventually materialise into a vocal work, to be completed later this year.

While staying at the Fish Factory, Baz breathed in the feeling of space, silence and a sense of deep time. He got a bit of faith back in the potential of kindness through his fellow residents, the Fish Factory team, and all the animals of Stöðvarfjörður. His time spent at the residency felt simultaneously stretched and far too short.

Glisten and this residency are made possible by the Dutch Fund for the Performing Arts.

Laura Nygren is a classical double bassist in recovery, now focused on experimental music practices, voice, and creating through acts of care. A returning resident to Fish Factory, her first visit in 2019 inspired her to create her avant-pop act Show Pony, she returned this past April to develop her new work, Glisten, together with collaborator Baz Laarakkers.

Glisten is an artistic research into the materiality of snow and ice. Using field recordings, vocal techniques, and electronics, Laura is developing a body of work around the molecular language of melting. Her research revolves around two questions: How can ephemeral materials express collective resilience? How can we, as artists, resist ecological destruction and fight political apathy? While a single snowflake might vanish instantly, a drift takes days.

Baz joined her mid-month, and together they adventured up the mountain of Stöðvarfjörður and took an unforgettable trip to the Hoffellsjökull glacier for field recording. Back at the factory, they spent time re-amping samples of snow and ice using Atomic Analog gear and composing from recordings made on the mountain, at the glacier, and around the factory. The results will eventually materialise into a vocal work, to be completed later this year.

While in Iceland, Laura recorded, wrote, absorbed, and enjoyed watching the country transition from winter to summer, dabbling along the way in her favourite hobbies: fiber arts and making bad ceramics.

Her time at Fish Factory was filled with laughter and inspiration from the other residents and factory regulars. She connected with local musician Sarah Steiner and recorded some bass for Sarah’s music — a highlight among many. It was a time of feeling close to people who started out as strangers and left as incredible friends, a reminder of how small, wonderful, and weird the world can be.

Glisten and this residency are made possible by the Dutch Fund for the Performing Arts (@FondsPodiumkunsten).

lauranygren.com

Lisa Wood is a visual artist, mother and partner from Scottish-Icelandic ancestry living in Treaty 2 Territory, Canada (Brandon, Manitoba). Her figurative art practice—shaped by her upbringing with her single mother and her life-long chronic health conditions—broadly investigates inclusion, marginalization and interpersonal connections (lisawood.ca). She exhibits her painting and prints nationally and internationally, and currently holds the position of Associate Professor at IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University.

While at the Fish Factory Lisa was investigating her lost Icelandic heritage and the Icelandic-Manitoba diaspora to visually explore themes of intergenerational rupture and connection, healing, and reconciliation. Lisa’s ancestors were a part of a major wave of immigration from Iceland to North America from 1870 to 1914. Although she does not have connection to her Canadian paternal Icelandic family, through online research she located several distant Icelandic relatives who live in the Eastern Fjords. Their family tree branches from one single relative who stayed behind in Iceland while the entire intergenerational family immigrated to Canada.

Amazingly, during the residency Lisa was able to meet and spent time with this extended family. They gave her a warm and generous welcome, sharing food, family photos and genealogical research, taking her to on trips to various important family sites and gifting her thoughtful mementos. From these experiences she developed an interactive artwork – an over-sized book on translucent drafting film – that features shifting memories and overlayed histories, incorporating and reflecting on Icelandic mythology, genealogical research and family relationships.

Website: https://lisawood.ca

Naomi Ison is a Woven Textile Designer and Printmaker based in Nottingham, UK.  

My practice explores shadow imagery and ephemeral moments. I am interested in how these fleeting moments offer momentary connection with our surrounding environment, an opportunity for calm in the turbulence and busyness of contemporary life.   

Prior to arriving at the Fish Factory, I had been exploring dry-point printing processes. Throughout my residency this became my focus, developing a series of dry-point prints responding to the Icelandic landscape, its shifting light and the fleeting shadows that shape our perception of place. My time at the Fish Factory quickly became about more than making prints; it offered a space to slow down, a space for calm.

The residency deepened the joy found in collaborative making and kinship, shaped through our shared studio space and collective rhythms. Thank you to my wonderful fellow residents, Adele, Elise, Fien, Lulu, Marina and Peter, I am deeply grateful for our month spent in Stöðvarfjörður. To Kris and Lukas, thank you for creating a space for us to dream.  

Instagram: naomiison_design 

Amy Hill is a multidisciplinary image maker based in the South West of England.

Whilst in Stöðvarfjörður, my practice helped ground me. I would make marks of the beautifully unfamiliar landscape of mountains and ocean, and the blurred snow scape from the minibus window en route to get groceries from Bónus. My writing practice became integral to my image making process and sparked a series of lino prints inspired by my morning alarm of Redpolls, an encounter with a raven and the Icelandic horses whose ears poked the mountain tops.

Having the time to solely make art, be still, and be in awe every waking second, allowed me to create from a place of instinct and curiosity. I didn’t put any pressure on a final outcome and allowed myself to explore other creative outlets such as movement improvisation, singing and filming which filtered into my work.

However, my time was made by the people I met at the Fish Factory. I have come away so inspired by the minds of the artists I shared this experience with, and the team hosting and running such a rich creative and cultural hub. Truly a transformational place.

Instagram: @byamyhill_

Alli Blakeman is a South Louisiana ceramic artist with a focus in figurative sculpture. Their process integrates the subconscious repurposing of internal dialogue of identity and southern
culture. Their work explores the contrast of humor and horror in response to the narratives within their sculptures.

Their time at Fish Factory was spent drawing inspiration from the peaceful wintery seclusion in eastern Iceland. They spent time exploring the varying landscape with other artists drawing out
thought provoking conversation. While learning about others processes and taking in each other’s work. This led to inspiration in creating their own sculptures and further planning for future projects. They explored functional sculpture work and experimented with imagery found within the vast factory space. Even delving into other media such as drawing and learning music.

Instagram: @allijoart

Website: https://www.allijoart.com/

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.

Website: https://www.liseborel.com/

Instagram: @liseborel_

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.

Instagram: @martinaemisipi

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”

Website: https://www.joelcrosswell.com/

Instagram: @joelcrosswell1

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.

Website: https://alixmcintosh.com/

Instagram: @alixmcintosh

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.

Website: kajsawingerup.com

Instagram: @kajsawingsphotography

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.

Website: emmatodd.art

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alucineris

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!

Instagram: @tam_nation

Website: https://www.itsalextam.com/

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.

www.andreacormier.com
@andreacormier_

Photos 1,2,3,5,6 by Alix McIntosh

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.”

Website jojthefirst.com

Facebook Joj Thefirst.

📷 Profile portrait by Adrianne Mathiowetz

📷 Photos 3,4,6 by Alix McIntosh

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):

https://medium.com/@jackieschuld/list/how-can-we-take-care-of-the-earth-and-ourselves-fd419811e205

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.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedistilleryart/

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

https://beamstudio.earth

https://www.instagram.com/beam.earth

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.”

https://www.janinevanveen.com/

https://www.instagram.com/janinevanveen

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.

www.eleanorsykes.co.uk

@eleanorsykesillustrator

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!”

Website: https://www.jane-affleck.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/being_littoral/