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

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

http://www.nancylangston.net/

Thank you, Nancy! :)

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

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

Visit Lula’s bandcamp for more of her work!

https://lulaa.bandcamp.com/

And her instagram!

Thanks, Lula! :)

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

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

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

Visit Madeleine’s website:

www.aleman.se

and her Instagram:

@madeleinealeman

Thank you, Madeleine! :)

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Susan! :)

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

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

Visit her instagram kathryn__mohr

& check her bandcamp

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

Thanks, Kathryn!

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

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

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

You can see more of her work on instagram: kitara22

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

Thanks, Eva!

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

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

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

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

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

https://vimeo.com/juliahechtman

Thanks, Julia! :)

Introducing Gabriele Glang, a German-American artist and bilingual poet from southern Germany, who spent the month of August at the Fish Factory. All her life, she has practiced both painting and writing, her creative work comprising both the visual and the literary. “The artist’s book is the perfect medium for me: a marriage between the written word and the image.”

Her German poetry debut, Goettertage, fictional monologues of the German Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, was published in 2017 by Kloepfer & Meyer (Tuebingen). In addition to her work as screenwriter and translator, she taught creative writing in English at the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen for many years. A painter and maker of artist’s books, her works have been published and exhibited widely in Europe and the US.

Her residency in Stödvarfjödur, part of a six-week journey circumnavigating the Icelandic coast, gave her the opportunity to gather impressions for a new body of work. At the Fish Factory she developed a visual language to express her responses to the sensory input of landscape and atmosphere of Iceland.

Foraging in and around the premises, as well as outdoors during walks on the heath and shoreline, Gabriele collected found objects from which she made mark-making tools, working in various water media, making artist’s books, collaging, and journaling about her impressions back in the studio.

Visit her website for more of her work: www.gabrieleglang.de 

or

Instagram to see recent work: gabrieleglang

Thanks, Gabi! :)

Meet Gabi Maynard, an artist and digital creator. She stayed with us in August.

“I recently completed my digital media studies at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, focusing on graphic design. Although I’ve created a lot of digital work, I still have a strong passion for traditional, analog media.

Initially I was planning on just pursuing printmaking at the factory, but reflecting on my time at the residency I’m surprised by how much I ended up experimenting with various mediums. I drew and painted more than I usually do, and discovered a new technique and style to my prints that I want to continue working on. Going to a brand new place by myself right after college was definitely nerve-wracking at first, but I’m very glad I did it. I think the experience has definitely helped me navigate what kind of artist I want to be moving forward and what I want to create.”

Visit her website for more of her work:

https://readymag.com/gsmaynardart/arte/

Thanks, Gabi! :)

Introducing Daisy Allen, an artist born and bred in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Daisy currently works in London, where her creative practice includes photography, illustration, art direction, and painting murals. We got to know Daisy in July, when she was here with only one other artist. She used this time to work on her personal projects, such as creating an art calendar with the help of visual backgrounds (on Zoom! :).

Daisy brought an airbrush, and she experimented with this machine, mimicking and recreating tattoo designs. She’s also a tattoo artist, and if you want to get stick-and-poked, you can catch her in London! Daisy is always on the lookout, searching for walls where she can paint murals, and she found one in Stöðvarfjörður at our Factory. Daisy got inspired while chit-chatting with the locals, relaxing in the local hot tub. That’s how the heitur pottur idea was born.

Daisy also worked with clay, creating different pieces, such as a candle holder and a small coffee cup. We also drove up to Seyðisfjörður for annual LungA festival!

To see more of Daisy’s work, visit her website:

https://www.daisyallen.co.uk/

https://www.instagram.com/_daisy_allen_/

Thank you, Daisy! :)

Edie is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Cornwall, UK. Her work shifts between film and animation to installation and costume for live performance.

‘I was drawn to the extreme, remote landscapes and harsh climates of Iceland, which have shaped the century-old mythology and its need for story. I used my two months in the fish factory to explore Icelandic folklore, making costumes and set to shoot my first reel of super8 film, which I plan to release in the upcoming months along with an analogue soundtrack which I recorded in the surrounding hills.’

Suzanne Yeremyan is a visual artist with a focus in experimental mixed-media abstraction.

During her attendance in the month of March, Suzanne spent the days outdoors and in the landscape, taking advantage of the fleeting window of daylight. Walking, searching, and observing is a crucial part of her process. Upon evening, she would then enter the studio and work into the late night. Suzanne opted to attend during the peak of Icelandic winter, as the harsh weather and unforgiving landscape observed in isolation immensely informs her work.

She aims to represent often overlooked visual subjects found in the natural world. Inspired by organic patterns, textures, and movement, her pieces are what she calls “homages” and result in something along the lines of abstract portraiture or detail studies.

Utilizing self-made solvents, washes, and pigments, her process often involves combining reactive elements and results in textures that have been described as caustic, and striking in detail.

For more, visit her website:

suzanneyeremyan.art

or follow her on instagram:

hellpix

Thanks, Suzanne! :)

Uncertain Studio is made up of Taiwanese artists Tao Chiang and Yen-Ting Tseng (a.k.a. Kappa). Coming from a theatre design background, they combine Tseng’s experiments in object theatre with Chiang’s ambient and aleatoric soundscapes to create spatial works that act as both performance and installation pieces. In their earlier collaborations, dramatic characters are replaced by daily objects to create mini-scale technical theatre with low-tech aesthetics, constructing portraits and narratives of human experience through the poetic utilization of objects and sounds which are, in themselves, lifeless.

In more recent years, they have been questioning the nature of performing arts, looking into the performative aspects of board games, workshops, and tourism to find new ways to discuss real world issues in a creative setting.

While at the Fish Factory, Tao experimented with sounds in our concert hall, ending his exploration with a performance and show-and-tell at the end of June. He gathered sounds and voices during the month and combined them into one long, wonderful, and relaxing soundscape.

Kappa researched the history of East Iceland and its industrial advances. She sees similarities between the islands of Taiwan and Iceland. She has created a map of East Iceland, its villages, population, etc., and provided an interesting overview of the area in a different light.

Check more of their work on their website: https://uncertainstudio.blogspot.com/

Thanks, Tao & Kappa! :)

Their stay was sponsored by National Culture and Arts Foundation (Taiwan) and Department of Cultural Affairs Taipei City Government.

We are introducing Gabe Duggan, an artist whose works bridge the realms of creativity and emotion. Gabe’s creations move boundaries, as they invite us to look at ordinary things with different eyes. Gabe’s versatility is shown through different mediums and techniques, and textile and technology provide a reliable foundation for Gabe’s work.

While at the Fish Factory, Gabe created a temporary installation in collaboration with the environment. Gabe’s recent work (WAS HERE, 2022; RECOHERE, 2021) was constructed of a synthetic, ballistic material, but in Stöðvarfjörður, Gabe worked with a naturally biodegradable material, cotton. Gabe drew large-scale lines across the land, which formed the word VISKUBIT.

One month of tedious but therapeutic work has ended with us walking about the cotton lines and following the direction of the letters, which are still imprinted into the fjord’s raw vegetation. The whole layout can be observed with a drone or even by satellite. The letters are slowly disappearing as the summer will soon end and snow will cover the banks where Gabe walked, thus ending the work whose self-destruction was the core impetus for its creation in the first place.

Visit her website for more of her work: w

Thanks, Gabe!

Eve is a visual artist from Rotherham, now based in Manchester. While at the Fish Factory, she explored Icelandic folklore and embodied creatures such as the Huldufólk by creating masks and incorporating local and natural materials into a full-body outfit.

She is fascinated by masks and performance, and she brought the roots of ancient stories alive through this medium. She created with paper mache, as working with such a simple material as paper represents to her a therapeutic process.

She hand-sculpted a few ceramic pieces and dipped them in a rusty-looking alligator glaze. The pieces were shipped home in a banana box (FRAGILE!). The masks she made were tried on by fellow artists walking about the fjord hilltops, perhaps hoping for the Huldufólk to descend from the misty mountains of Stöðvarfjörður.

Check more of her work on her website: https://www.evegittins.com/

or follow her on Ig: ewegittins

Thanks, Eve! :)

Introducing Violet Roest, a visual artist from the Netherlands. Her creative journey delves into the realms of emotion, colour, and expression.

She spent the month of June here with us in Stöðvarfjörður, but she’s been to this little village, before anyone thought of recording music, spinning pottery wheels, and painting portraits in the middle of a fish processing plant. She revisited old friends and used this time to think and translate feelings into visual narratives.

She worked with 3D objects made out of clay and plaster, and that’s how a family of whales was born. She also suited up, covered her boots with wet rags, and did some metal cutting with our plasma cutter! The whales were shipped home, but some unfortunately didn’t survive the journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

“Violet sculpts whales on our fjord, and friendships old and new”. -R. R.

For more of her work visit her website: https://www.expressie.nl/violetroest/over-mij/

Thanks, Violet. :)

Kukka Pitkänen is a Finnish visual artist working mainly in the field of printmaking and drawing, and during the residency, she worked on drawings, photographing and printmaking techniques.

Her works are often connecting human and nature, and in Fish Factory she focused on a lot of nature detail research, which she transferred to her drawings.

She drew nature forms, and she multiplied and scaled them into works. She is interested into the sea and the mountains, and she took inspiration from those natural elements.

Visit her website: http://kukkapitkanen.com/

Or follow her on instagram: kukkapitkanen

Thanks, Kukka! :)

Rhonda Rosenheck is an emerging poet, writer and biblical translator. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies and have been performed live. She lives in rural New York State, USA.

While at the Fish Factory, she worked on a translation project, and she delighted us with witty poems and ingenious verses. Rhonda offered her fellow housemates to attend her Thursday online yoga sessions, and she’s responsible for organising our equinox dinner gathering, followed by a midnight stroll up in the hills.

Publications include: The Five Books of Limericks; Sin No More! A Biblical Sea Shanty; Looking: Out, Up, In & Under Rocks; and Yiddische Yoga: OYsanas for Every Generation.

Visit Rhonda’s website for more of her work: https://www.rhondarosenheck.com/

Thanks, Rhonda! :)

Selena Unger is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based on Vancouver Island, Canada. She creates ceramic and paper mache sculptures, drawings, paintings, poetry, and installations.

Her work explores psychological phenomena as well as philosophical queries in a playful and colourful way that invites viewers to engage curiously in her chimerical constructions.

While at the Factory Selena worked on various sculptural projects creating a series of ceramic pieces titled Gastropoda, as well as two paper mache sculptures that explored dream symbols and mythical beings with connection to the location.

In addition to these projects, she also collaborated with a fellow artist in residence, Jikke Lesterhuis, by comprising a poem to accompany her animation titled “Wind Dwellers.”

For more of Selena’s work visit her website: https://selenaunger.persona.co/

or follow her on instagram @selena.unger

Thank you, Selena! :)

“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