Jiyun Park // February, March, April 2019
photo: Lotta Cronander Lindh
Jiyun Park is a visual and sound artist from South Korea, based in Cologne, Germany. She arrived at the Fish Factory in the cold and snowy month of February and left the residency with the first flashes of spring-like sunlight in mid-April.
Jiyun Park // February, March, April 2019
photo: Lotta Cronander Lindh
During her stay with us, Jiyun was working on her sound project called Transcending Space, she started a few years before, in which the border between the place where we are and the place where we are not is being erased by playing with live-streamed and recorded sounds from different locations.
Zheng Huang is a Chinese art curator based in Paris, France. While Zheng´s usual art practice concerns criticism, exhibition production and art curation, coming to Iceland Zheng shifted her interests towards using video as a media.
Zheng Huang // March 2019
Zheng created a series of three short videos related to departures and adventures and made them available by QR code for both citizens of Stöðvarfjörður and tourists passing by our town.
Luowei Liao is a Chinese visual artist based in Tokyo, Japan. Luowei joined us to admire Iceland waking up from its winter hibernation.
Since Luowei lives in one of the most modern cities on our planet, she found surrounding nature extremely interesting and described being close to nature as the most enjoyable experience. She enjoyed long hikes in the sun, walks by the fiord and looking at how the spring slowly makes its way to Stödvarfjörður.
Luowei Liao // March 2019
During her stay with us Luowei, spent the majority of her time in the ceramics studio, working on her very first ceramic pieces inspired by one of the local legends.
Ariel Kessler is a visual artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. She joined the Factory team for the month of March 2019.
Ariel Kessler // March 2019
Ariel fell in love with Iceland, during her first visit to our beautiful country six years ago. When deciding on the residency destination, Iceland seemed like a clear choice. During her stay with us, Ariel developed a small obsession towards stones, pebbles and rocks. She found the surroundings truly fascinating, what lead her to taking long and inspiring walks along Stöðvarfjörður´s shoreline.
Aaron Scott is an American designer, based in New York City, who stayed with us for the month of February.
Aaron Scott // February 2019
Aaron came to Iceland in search of a new direction for his work. He states that the landscape is being a huge factor and inspiration during his process of creation. On his way to Fish Factory, Aaron got stunned by incredible topography of Icelandic landscape, which, covered with snow, reminded him of crumpled paper. That lead to the process of experimenting with paper, using it as a way to conceptualize encountered scenery.
Alfredo Esparza Cárdenas is a Mexican photographer, who joined us for his third time in Stöðvarfjörður in February 2019. He describes the main subject of his interest as a relationship between human being and the environment.
Alfredo Esparza Cárdenas // February 2019
Alfredo started his project connected to Söðvarfjörður in 2017 by trying to describe people living in the town, through portraying their houses, trying to find a language for universal problems, touching not only people of the remote town in Iceland but as well impacting citizens of small villages in Mexico. Spending his first month in our small town Alfredo discovered that 30 days is not enough time to tell the story of Stöðvarfjörður´s citizens. The same thing happened during his second visit. That is why Alfredo decided he will continue the project for the upcoming years, as with every visit more elements are being incorporated into his own approach.
Patricia Casey is a visual artist, based in Sydney, Australia. During her first residency in Fish Factory, Patricia came to stay with us at the peak of Icelandic summer in June 2017. This time, hoping to experience real Icelandic winter, she decided to arrive in the windy and snowy month of February.
Patricia Casey // February 2019
Throughout her both times in the Fish Factory Patricia found the link between walking, thinking and making as an important part of her creative process. Patricia left home in the middle of Australian summer to find herself living and travelling in the rough wintery weather, that she has never experienced before. During her long walks, besides discovering that walking in the icy roads is not the easiest task, she also discovered unbelievable landscapes within the melting ice and the layers of snow and ice on the ground.
Ruth Waterhouse is an illustrator coming from Cumbria, England. Living by the sea and the fells at home, Ruth wanted to discover the similarities and differences between the pace and characteristics of her homeland and small Icelandic town of Stöðvarförður.
Ruth Waterhouse // February 2019
Before arriving at the Creative Centre, Ruth´s original plan was to focus on printmaking and illustration. However, at the beginning of her residency, she started experimenting with ceramics and got totally absorbed by it. She created a series of fauna- and flora-inspired ceramic pieces.
Elisabeth Kuklenyik is a Chicago based comics artist, illustrator and educator. She stayed with us in the cold and icy month of February.
Elisabeth joined us to work on her comic book series My Mother of Old Bones. The story is a mixture of biographical threads and explorational journeys into Elisabeth´s Eastern European roots. As a young girl, Elisabeth got seduced by infamous mystical Slavic creature Baba Jaga and her, as she says, obsession started to evolve ever since.
Elisabeth Kuklenyik // February 2019
While everyone else would describe this Slavic witch as a purely evil creature, Elisabeth, during her explorations discovered unbelievable virtues of this old, scary lady. During her stay with us, Elisabeth regained her creative powers and continued working on the series.
Alec Aita is an American visual artist based in Berlin, Maryland, who joined us for the cold months of January and February. Alec earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Salisbury University.
Alec Aita // January, February 2019
During his residency time in Fish Factory, Alec decided to switch his sculptural creating habits and focused on photography as a medium. He created a series of photographs and videos, which were aimed as an attempt of understanding and breaking preconceptions of reality and what we deem as normal.
Laura Casassas is a design researcher and educator from Barcelona. She joined us for the snowy month of January.
During her stay with us, Laura worked on writing and revisiting her master thesis Using is caring (about), in which she questions the field of critical design and its relation with the possibility of subverting the uses of everyday objects.
Laura Casassas // January 2019
Inspired by the windy weather she could not help on building a kite. She rediscovered drawing and spent plenty of time working on ceramics. Laura enjoyed her time in Stöðvarfjörður taking long walks, admiring Icelandic fauna and jumping on the yellow buoy around the factory studios.
Inkeri Viljanen is a Finnish painter based in Vasa, Finland and stayed with us for the month of January 2019.
Inkeri describes her dark sense of humour and other human beings as her main inspiration, emphasizing that art does not have to be serious. During her residency, Inkeri was working on the material for her upcoming exhibition in Vasa. She created a series of portraits, where distorted faces are being invaded by nature and architecture. She also rediscovered the joy of creation while experimenting with ceramics.
Niko Mitsuko is an American artist working in fields of painting, photography and mixed media. She was staying with us in the month of November 2018.
In the past years, Niko has established herself as a professional artist working with galleries across the United States and Europe. Believing that art is a way to get at the soul of modern society, Niko strives to create photographs with aesthetic, paint-like qualities, bestowing her works with abstract, surrealist, and minimalist properties.
Áine Kelly is an Irish visual artist specialising in photography and sculpture. She graduated in Fine Art from the Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork in 2016.
Áine Kelly // November 2018
During her time with us, she made work with ice that was often foraged from the mountains on warmer days. Lumps, sheets and crystals of ice were placed onto light-sensitive paper and processed in the darkroom. Magnifying lenses were often used to control and refract the light passing through various states of ice and water. The intention of the work is to capture an abstract impression of the landscape and present the transient nature of ice, alluding to the country’s retreating glaciers.
Santiago Zarzosa is a European artist based in Minneapolis, MN USA. He was born and educated in Spain. He has been exhibiting and selling his works over the last few decades. Zarzosa works predominantly with oil painting, drawing and etching.
During the residency in November 2018, he expanded his multidisciplinary practice by experimenting with clay-based sculpture, lino printmaking, manual photography and watercolours.
These new works investigate local and national stories from the Eastern Fjords of Iceland. They convey the importance of the merging of nature and old legends with the culture in the local and National perspective.
Mikkel was with us in the month of October. He is an animator and lives in the Czech Republic where he studies PhD in arts at the Tomas Bata University in Zlín where he also did MA at the Department of the Animation.
His works are mainly focused on nature, landscapes and animals. In animated projects and films, he combinates the classical drawn and the digital drawn 2D animation.
At the Fish Factory, he worked and played simply with paper, pencil and watercolours. His pieces of art are influenced by the Icelandic landscapes, mainly mountain Súlur and by the Icelandic birds.
Courtney Powell is a Canadian artist, based out of Vancouver, BC, and was with us for October 2018. She is a muralist and painter, and obtained her BFA from York University.
During her residency, Courtney created a mural featuring Iceland’s national flower, mountain avens, and two of its birds, the arctic tern and heiðlóa. She named the arctic tern ‘Maple’ and the heiðlóa ‘Tuque’ to add a Canadian touch.
Courtney is particularly attracted to dreamy landscapes and characters. A large part of Courtney’s work plays with the idea of transparency and layers. She is currently exploring the idea of landscapes merged with photo editors and translating those images into a painting on canvas.
Nika Winn is a visual artist from Kansas City, MO in the United States. She spent the month of October 2018 at the Fish Factory to explore new modes of working in her studio practice.
During her time here Nika worked with canvas that she painted, cut out and then pieced together to create her work titled, Cat Horse Sheep. The project itself became a visual narrative her time spent in Iceland.
Ben Davis is a photographic artist and bookmaker from the Greater New York City area. He was with us for the month of October 2018.
While at the Fish Factory he spent a lot of time exploring the fjord and surrounding mountains/landscape. He also started to experiment with night photography.
His current photographic practice revolves around documenting the world around him through still life and landscape images. The work shows the oddities and beauty of everyday life in common spaces that others might miss. A large influence in his work is the geometry and form in these ordinary spaces. He finds scenes that are considered commonplace and brings them forward in a new light, divulging a new interpretation of the set.
Christopher Johnsey is a painter from Sheffield in the UK. He studied BA Fine Art at Middlesex University, London, graduating in 2010.
Chris makes reportage drawings and paintings, poetry and sound recordings, exploring the relationship between the environment and the human race, and our impact.
During his month with us in October, he studied the ever-changing climate and environment of Stödvarfjördur. Working on board and old curtain material found at the Fish Factory, Chris created a painting capturing the atmosphere of his surroundings that he constructed by making a daily entry onto the surface.
Chris worked outside in all weathers, allowing the elements to affect the surface of the piece. Sometimes the rain would erase the previous days work, or the sunlight and crisp wind would dry or crack the painted material. He was interested in what happens in giving up a certain degree of control, and how the outcome creates a document and a record of his time in Stödvarfjördur.
Maggie Middleton is a printmaker and artist from the US. She was with us for the month of September 2018. She is currently studying for her MFA in Printmaking at the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Eugeniusza Geppertain Wrocław, Poland. She received her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College where she graduated with High Honors in Studio Art. Her current body of work revolves around the concept of “camouflage,” both in the sense of disguising ones-self and also the highly politicized and gendered fabric.
Nikolina Kovalenko attended Fish Factory residency in September 2018 where she was working on a series of paintings titled “Guardians Of Northern Lights”, processing and interpreting Icelandic sagas and legends through the visual landscape and cultural associations.
She is interested in humanity’s vanishing connection with Nature and strives to expose the consequences our everyday actions have on the environment. Kovalenko works with fragile ecosystems creating artwork inspired by locations specific to each project.
This series explores the symbolism of textures found in Nature, magnifying the mundane and transforming it into the sublime. The artist chose aluminium as a painting surface to convey the austerity, endurance and subtle glory of Iceland—a vast volcanic laboratory tamed by the ocean.
Nikolina Kovalenko received her MFA from Moscow Surikov Art Institute (Moscow, Russia) in 2011 and studied at Universität der Künste (Berlin) in 2010. Her work has been reviewed in art blogs, newspapers and magazines and is in numerous corporate and private collections worldwide. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.
Deidre Cavazzi is a multimedia choreographer from Southern California. She spent September 2018 at the Fish Factory, where she gathered visual and textual material based on the relationship between landscape and folklore for a future performance project.
Deidre has always been passionate about collaborative projects that embrace and explore the relationship between art and science; she feels strongly that inquiry and creative investigation drive discovery and experimentation, and frequently engages with projects that are cross-disciplinary, non-traditional, and that bring together diverse communities. She draws inspiration from scientific concepts—bringing environments to life onstage or in site-specific locations, and incorporating multimedia to transport the audience and evoke ideas. In addition to collecting folk stories and exploring the geology of the East Fjords, Deidre kept a blog about her time in Iceland and also started developing a dance for camera piece, centered on gesture and textures, both in art-making and in the local landscape.
Deidre Cavazzi // September 2018
Deidre is a process artist and delights in the research, experimentation, dialogue and development of the community that occurs between the seed of an idea and the final curtain call onstage. Whether she is exploring concepts of quantum physics, Fibonacci numbers in nature, climate change in the Arctic, or the geology of Iceland, she strives to initiate collaboration with experts in related fields, hopefully inspiring audiences to learn more; she is interested in creating art which serves as a catalyst for conversation, knowledge and connection to the natural world.
Debbie Fish is an installation artist and set designer based in Wellington, New Zealand and she joined us for the month of September. Her installations are inspired by environmental and social concerns and she is particularly interested in the use of found and recycled materials in her work.
During her residency at the Fish Factory, Debbie was working on a visual exploration of a new series of works inspired by the ‘Doughnut Economy’, through the lens of the fishing industry. Debbie spent her time examining different textures from the area and combined these into a series of small mixed media works that draw on rust, stingray skin and displaced data points.
She is drawn to fishing villages, having spent a month in 2017 in Taiwan as one of the artists in residence as part of the Keelung NMMST (National Museum of Marine Science and Technology) International Art Project, creating a work School of Scales using found and recycled materials and the help of local school children.
