Noah Hartley is a conservation artist and art educator based in the United States (North Carolina). His plan was to illustrate Iceland’s wildlife and in doing so study the history and relationship with them and the island they inhabit.
Artist Statement:
”After seeing multiple artists that were staying there do printmaking, I decided it would be a good idea to grow my printmaking skills and learn how to teach it for my classes back home. I was able to create 5 linocut prints with lots of prints from each one and truly learned so much from so many different artists (including Una)!
My stay at the Fish Factory undoubtedly changed me as a person and an artist, and equipped me with the necessary skills to teach printmaking in the states!”
Claire Thill is a Luxembourg-based writer, performer, and theatremaker interested in exploring multidisciplinary territories of performance and storytelling. Her pieces start from concepts and broader themes rather than from a structured idea of the plot. She intertwines different elements such as text and the body in movement with image and audio in order to create performance structures that are at once multilayered and fragmented.
She used her residency at the Fish Factory to delve deep into the preparation of her latest theatre project, an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s ‘Der Besuch der alten Dame’. The piece uses the original script in order to investigate the feminist and women narratives hidden behind the lines. During her stay, she wrote and re-wrote fragments and extensively researched themes such as trauma, collective guilt, and rituals of forgiveness.
Florian Gantner, based in Vienna (Austria), is a writer and Art director of a literary festival.
During his stay at the Fish Factory, he worked on his next novel „Agile Arno“, which reflects on the future of work, service society and dignity. When not writing on his novel, he tries to create poems of undeniable truth, in the tradition of the Discoparty-Brothers (Licht ist gut für Augen / Seife aber nicht; Light is good for eye / but soap is not).
Alicja Natalia Wacowska (Balance with Alice) is a yoga teacher with certification as RYT200 – Multi-style Yoga Teacher Training Course, Yin Yoga Teacher and Yoga Nidra. She mainly works with her own method which is based on intuitive yoga flow and consciousness movement. She is also a mentor for creative development, with a few years of professional experience working on various cultural projects.
During her six weeks in the artist residency at Fish Factory, she did some yoga sessions for the artists and arranged a workshop called ”Look into your creative power”. She also continued to develop the ~Yoga & Creativity project, which focuses on exploring how yoga and other practices influence the process of creative work. She uses the word “~ yoga” in the means around yoga and other forms of conscious movement, mindfulness, or embodiment practices. The project includes interviews with creatives, workshops, yoga classes, private coaching/mentoring sessions and more of will be enriched by new forms emerging from the research. During her stay, she did interviews with 3 artists which are available to listen here: https://m.soundcloud.com/yogaandcreativity
Artist statement:
” For two weeks I’ve arranged Balance Studio where artists could come any time during the day to relax, recharge and take some time to connect with their creativity. I prepared the room to fulfill the various needs depending on what feels good at that time, for example, it was possible to practice yoga, dance, stay in silence, write, meditate, drink tea, use some cards or create.
My motivation is to connect yoga and conscious development practices. I have a few years of work experience in different cultural and creative projects where I worked with artists, designers, creatives. My intention is to explore how these two worlds influence each other and what are the possibilities for balancing the creative work process. I would like to open possibilities for creatives to grow, bloom, and flow their potential through the channels of conscious and grounding practices.”
Anna Lehespalu is an Estonian photographer from Tallinn. She uses photography, video, and music as a medium of expression. Her process of making art is very intuitive and connected with psychology, which helps her to research and understand the human mind. She expresses her feelings by documenting her closest surroundings and environment, which is often the landscape.
Artist statement:
” I had a big dream to visit Iceland for a very long time and for a while it did not happen. However, the wanting to go and knowing Iceland will somehow transition me got stronger and stronger. So much that I even visited Iceland in my dreams while sleeping. Then In 2020 it finally happened. I went to the South of Iceland first and started a project that I did not know what it’s going to be about. I knew that it will get more clear to me intuitively in the process. That year turned out to be an intense year for everyone. I was able to stay in Iceland for about 7 months.
The project I started has a name. It’s called: Stay home, go out. It is inspired by nature being a resource of new found freedom.
During the residency in Fish Factory, I started working more deeply with my idea while giving space and time to explore the ideas and feelings that reflect back to me through nature. The goal was to get closer to the series of images and videos for a personal exhibition. While staying in the residency I discovered many suppressed emotions and fears inside of me and I decided to observe them more closely.
Usually, I work mostly alone but this time I got very lucky and was surrounded by many beautiful souls who I was able to share this time with and they helped me in my search more than they know. The fish factory is a very magical place and there is a lot of love there. What emerged from my residency is a lot of new material. I work a lot with film photography, I am excited to be able to work further with all the material that was born there in the east fjords. I started to work on a new idea there at Stöðvarfjörður, where I put myself as a subject in nature for a series of self-portraits. As a human, I am interested in what way I am a part of nature. How I am born from the ground and become the ground. I am looking for new ways to connect through listening to my instincts and testing my own limits within nature.”
If you want to see more of her work, check out her Instagram account: www.instagram.com/annalehespalu
Emma Banks is a poet born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, and who has since wandered all over. She’s currently in the process of completing her BFA in English from Kenyon College and the University of Oxford. While her work is written and therefore visually static, she adds dimensionality to it by weaving storytelling and imagery, crafting together a sort of tempered, ebbing narrative. She is currently in the process of finishing her debut poetry collection, titled A Body of Its Hungers.
Artist Statement
I (so very luckily) came to the factory nearly two years after my project was approved and as an almost entirely different person. This book too has held many forms, both in my relationship to it and the story it’s trying to convey. At first glance, this collection was a reflection of myself and the environments I’ve found myself in over the years. And in a way, it still is: it’s very much tied to the idea of place, to the idea of the self and body in a specific landscape, and the manner in which our memory influences and is influenced by spaces we occupy. But in other ways, it’s no longer just my story that I’m attempting to tell. It’s about my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, which is perched in a water-crossed part of the central Southern United States. It’s about the generations of women in my family, of the birds stalking through the reeds with each season’s tide, of being empty and full, of my leaving and returning.
During my residency, I was able to fold a divided prototype of the book, with almost two sections complete. I never anticipated writing nearly half of my book here, but the factory ended up being such a kismet space to redevelop A Body of Its Hungers. That’s not just because of its energy and history (and all the wonderful people within it). Situated right by the mouth of the fjörd and tucked between two mountain ranges, the factory building is both hidden by and revealed through the fog that trudges low towards the water. What a captivating, mysterious, and inherently of-the-landscape space to think about the places I have been, who is still there, and what of me exists because of them.
Members of this international collective come from various creative fields; fine arts, dance, performance, music, sound engineering, and audiovisual communication. The collective does not yet have a name. During their stay at the Centre, the group focused on creating a new performance piece juxtaposing different elements from each of their professional fields.
“We used the opportunity at the residency to knit together a team to explore sound and movement. Experimenting with acoustic instruments, microphones, synthesizers, samples, and field recordings, we found ways to produce soundscapes and melodies based on trust and affection.”
Two members of the group, Otho and Erna Gunnarsdóttir are a part of the Icelandic Dance Company and the residency stay of the group was a collaboration between the Creative Centre and the Icelandic Dance Company. The performance piece the group developed during the residency stay was later on performed in the Reykjavik City Theather, the home of the Icelandic Dance Company.
Gillian Pokalo is a visual artist living and working near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the USA. Her artwork integrates printmaking, photography, and painting, and it reflects on the ways that man-made architecture is eclipsed by nature.
During her residency at the Fish Factory, Gillian photo-documented abandoned farmhouses in the East Fjords, developed those images as silkscreens, and created a series of paintings that incorporated her photographic imagery along with cyanotypes of wildflowers that were blooming throughout July. The pieces she created while at the Fish Factory were authentic reflections of the time and place in which they were created.
Anne Klein is a printmaking and textile artist from Chicago in the US. She completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an MA/MFA candidate in print media at the University of Iowa. She specializes in woven textiles, illustration, print media, and design for print.
During her time at the Fish Factory, Anne worked on a series of linocut prints drawing on the surreal landscape and idle sleepy scenes of small-town Stöðvarfjörður. Anne’s work typically responds to consumer culture specific to the American Midwest. This moment of reprieve in the eastern fjords was an exciting exploration into Iceland’s vernacular visual language. Anne’s work is underpinned by an open narrative loosely connecting each print as comic panels. She found that depicting these scenes in the stark black and white format of the linocut reflected the occasionally unsettling deep shadows and sleeplessness that came with the midnight sun in the Icelandic summer.
Artist statement:
In a turbulent moment marked by social isolation and all-consuming capitalism, I’m desperately clinging to comic relief. My work reacts to a consumer culture of kitsch icons and constructed narratives that have wormed their way into our collective consciousness. I create images of flattened dreamscapes depicting ritual, routine, and repressed memory through allegorical narratives of everydayness. I poke fun at the hellishly mundane pains of everyday life.
I work in printmaking to comment on the value and preciousness of a masterpiece in its singularity. The matrix becomes a symbol of feminine labor, the womb, and me, the imperfect machine of mass production in this mode of making. I am interested in the relationship between maker and consumer; often asking who the artwork is for and who has access to it.
Ruby Bateman is a visual artist, working and living in London. Her work is often self-referential, (re)depicting and translating imagery across different materials and processes. She uses film, photography, drawing, and painting to discuss her personal and political relationship with (institutionalised) motherhood.
Artist statement:
Iceland’s legacy for storytelling, Norse poetry, mythology, and folk law are renowned worldwide, sparking imaginations for centuries. The Fish Factory residency immersed me into Iceland’s dramatic landscape, the generous spirit of Icelanders, and their culture and language. I was able to write, draw and film a piece of allegorical fiction inspired by the absurdity of Norse Mythology, the Stöðvarfjörður mountains, and my passion for maternal politics.
This has been a truly transformative experience, opening myself up to the written word in a new and more literal way. Before I had been exploring storytelling in more abstract terms on film, often drawing on myself as the subject. Now I feel I have progressed into a more imaginative mode of language, one that can relate to my interests and concerns for (institutionalised) motherhood without having to put myself so centrally. What emerged from my month’s residency was a super 8 film, a collection of sculptures, film photography, and a series of ink drawings: originally storyboards for my film, but became works in their own right. The trust and freedom I was given at the Factory allowed me to create work more prolifically and without expectation or inhibition. I was able to weave together a fully formed collection of work that commented on patriarchy and its suppression of women’s reproductive and intellectual knowledge throughout history.
Nina Schipoff is a German interdisciplinary artist, living and working in Geneva, Switzerland. She graduated from the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in 2008 and obtained a postgraduate diploma in painting from the Gevena School of Stage Set Design in 2009. Nina articulates her art around the concepts of space, time, movement, and light with a specific focus on the interactions between humans and nature in the accelerating world. She questions the invisible and visible traces of the interaction between man and landscape and their ecological and geopolitical impact on the world.
At the very beginning of her stay in Fish Factory, Nina spent a lot of her time outdoors getting to know her new home. This motivated her to realize a series of photos titles the ”Untold Stories”. She also enjoyed exploring and integrating sculpture as a new medium into her work practice. This finally lead to the installation ”in the land of magic volcanos and golden waterfalls”, completing her photographic narration.
Once her curiosity had been responded to and her mind has settled a bit, she realized her main project, the development of motivational hypnosis for a sustainable future in a safer world. Nina, who is also a trained hypnotist, found a lot of inspiration on her discovery trips through Icelandic nature as well as in scientific environmental research.
Anna Zadra is an Austrian conceptional artist and stage designer. After studying theatre-, film- and media studies at Vienna University, she completed her studies at the University of Mozarteum Salzburg with a stage- and exhibition design diploma. Her work revolves around the relationship between humankind and its surroundings. While focussing on man’s location in space, she tries to collect and display its materialistic and haptic aspects in her artistic research.
Anna’s studio work process, though thoroughly backed with research in literature and applied science, is highly immanent. Materials derived from the surroundings of her current workplace form the base of her artwork. She then enhances her conceptual and artistic work by experimenting with different materials and media and adds her personal perception of the space surrounding her. Anna characterizes her work by playing with spacial dimensions and adding a high level of materiality and meticulous precision to it.
During her residency at the Fish Factory Anna tried to grasp the relationship Icelanders have with their nature. While observing their behavior and lifestyle within the exceptional landscape of Iceland, Anna tried to gain consciousness for all living things around her. She went on several hikes in the surrounding mountains in order to experience the natural forces that work on the island with her own body. Her experiences in Iceland have fuelled her interdisciplinary research and enhanced her inspiration for her Ph.D. studies subject “The exhaustion of space in the area of the Anthropocene”.
Sofia Fresia and Delfo Pozzi are two Italian artists working in the fields of Painting and Photography. Sofia completed her MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts of Torino in March 2021, while Delfo is studying Photography at Accademia di Brera in Milano.
They decided to go to Iceland together in order to work on a common project focusing on landscape and climate change. During their time at the Fish Factory, Sofia and Delfo realized a series of works on paper using the technique of mixed media on cyanotype: Delfo took the photos and obtained the negatives, then they worked together at the printing process, and finally Sofia modified the printed cyanotype with pencils and watercolors in order to get a final result placed in the middle between painting and photography. During the time they spent in Iceland, they also worked on single projects: Delfo realized some photo series, while Sofia had the opportunity to create two big oil paintings on canvas inspired by pools, her personal universe of visual references.
Sofia Fresia (Italy, 1992) is a visual artist who draws mainly on the iconographic universe of swimming to create artworks that deal with contemporary society and the new difficulties involved in being part of it, with particular regard for the environment and for the problems that affect young people living in a changing world. In her main series Pools (2017 – ongoing), she uses references to recurring elements in her own experience, modifying and recombining them in order to create paintings that can provide an active reflection on today’s issues. The constant references to the swimming world recall her personal experience as a swimmer, but also the concept of social liquidity introduced by Z. Bauman and the key role of water for life on Earth.
Delfo has been studying Photography at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, since 2018. After a master’s degree cum laude in Literature at the University of Genoa, with a thesis on the Theory of narration, he chose photography as his favorite medium for expressing himself. Coming from an over ten-year passion for photojournalism and portrait, he is gradually probing and deepening the possibilities related to art photography. Even in this evolution, the goal of his research remains truly humanistic: to collect the testimony of the passage of time and the trace of the complexity of the relationships that are created between people in social contexts. He is a mountain enthusiast who loves rock and ice climbing, skiing, or simply take a tour on foot in the natural environment.
Lisette de Greeuw (1990) was born in Hoorn, the Netherlands. She lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. During her residency, she used the time at the Fish Factory to think, read and research. Besides that, she started to work on a new embroidery piece and a new series of drawings based on the embroidery work. She has also experimented a bit with folding lines and scratch letters.
Artist statement:
In my current practice, I’m working around (abstract) language and translation. I notice that I’m losing my own language. I don’t make, build, sentences as I’ve learned. I miss subtleties and nuances. I notice that when I would like to say something I’m searching for the right form to say it by constantly making translations.
By making translations, on one hand, you lose material and on the other, you can gain information. This is depending on the translation itself but also on the viewer, who interprets. By making different works that have this translation in it I’m testing the structural limits of communication of which language and translation are part of. I want to extend this into absurdity. To make a multitude of images that all have the same meaning. In a way, all those images are working as a tool to the actual work. But for me ‘the tool’ is as important as ‘the actual work’. I see every translation I make as a language on its own. Within each language, there are nuances and subtleties that you only get to know when you know the language well.
I created a lexicon (based on embroidery patterns) for making images, which creates a threshold for the viewer. It’s a personal logic that is systematized. I hold on to this structure to build images that can be filled with new meaning – independent of the material, medium, or scale of the work. In this system, I leave space for ‘mistakes’. Making mistakes loosen up the work and create space for new forms and meaning. By using a lexicon that not everyone understands I create a problem with communication: what is the best form for information and meaning to function as well as possible?
Mallory is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer from New York working out of Brooklyn. Mallory’s work consists of printmaking as well as wearable textiles; including drawing, painting, and small editions of clothing. She completed her B.F.A in Printmaking at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2018 and have been working on independent projects and freelance work since; while attending residency programs and developing a clothing brand and collaborative screen printing business.
During her time at the Fish Factory, Mallory worked on a large-scale linen picture book, cooking, and drawing shared domestic spaces. This work came from thoughts of collectivity and how it relates to language, food, and handmade processes. Her main focus during my time at the factory was a latex coated linen book called Three as well as a short written manuscript, Tomorrow Morning.
Artist Statement:
Through multiple mediums and disciplines, I am interested in relationships. My primary focus is defining relationships, including romantic, familial, and other interpersonal relationships as they relate to relationships on a formal level. I am studying the butterfly effect; the way that small things can have an impact on larger systems. Three is a sculptural book about butterflies and feelings (the to the touch kind). I have noticed that these qualities of life often evade language; they exist more as sensations. Three exists within this space as a part of a whole; my work includes created objects as well as interactions – potlucks and parties or a video call. The translation of thoughts can vary visually across different languages but reduced they are all pictures made by sensitive human hands. The language within Three bridges the gap between language in its literal sense (thoughts as symbols as letters as words as sentences) and nonverbal exchange.
I am interested in the qualities of life that make it all kind of feel like it’s worth something. As things become more and more automated and clean and geometric sometimes the human touch can be lost. There is so much time spent trying to mimic the human touch that could be spent making a big dinner for your friends and family or holding someone really tightly. I am not yet willing to eliminate the more luscious qualities of life at the expense of more measured order (cleaner, faster, less waiting, less wondering, less mess). I would like to reframe the mess, frame it specifically so that it is viewed, and reframe touch so that the results of it are beautiful without retouch.
Imogen Marsteller is a British-American artist who expresses herself through photography, painting and drawing. She completed her BA in Studio Arts and Art and Architectural History at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and at the University of Edinburgh.
During her time at the Fish Factory, Imogen explored her many modes of creation – finding more connections between each way of making. Her work tends to focus on the exploration of friends and becoming friends with oneself, and all that entails. She references Art Historical compositions and color schemes within her works. In particular through painting and working with thread. This brings out an aesthetic interest focusing on line and contrast, thus fusing a graphic sensibility with a painterly one. She continued to explore the idea of monumental and painting further by using stitched lines and forms. She also used different shaped canvas, paper, or multiple pieces to create a quilt type of work – to further break down the body.
Artist Statement:
From, my early Pre-Raphaelite influence to my most recent interest in aspects of the Renaissance, the Baroque and Pop art, I have fused a graphic and painterly sensibility, as evidenced by my strong use of line, color and shade, with a visual focus on contemporary intimacy. My paintings and drawings use stoicism in restrained poses and monumentalism on an expanded scale. While my photography borders on the humorous and the serious, the commercial and the artistic. I use my painting to self-examine while I use my photography to distort through a surrealist lens, to capture female play through both my self-portraits and my depictions of others. All my mediums result in ennobling the lives of women and enriching my practice both figuratively and literally.
Karen Morris is a visual artist from Richmond, Virginia and she joined us here at the Fish Factory art residency for the month of May 2021. She spent her time here in Iceland traveling and taking pictures of landscapes. During her residency, she painted with pastels and she used her photos as a reference. The end result was beautiful, photorealistic pastel paintings of the Icelandic landscape.
Karen spent a lot of her time here visiting surrounding villages and their attractions and she always selflessly offered a ride to the supermarket or to the Djúpivogur hot pot! :)
Sami Cutrona is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, working in sculpture, photography, and related media. Sami received a dual MFA/MA in Studio Art and History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2020 and a dual BA in Photography and Art History from Lycoming College in 2017.
The center of Sami’s work here at the Fish Factory Residency was to challenge and shift photographic tradition, both conceptually and materially. Their work stems from their experience as a queer non-binary person and they create to connect and to invite the viewer to connect with their body. Sami is interested in exploring the body as a vessel for gender identity, queerness, body dysmorphia and trauma. They’re using self-portraiture to reclaim autonomy and disrupt how power and meaning have been inscribed on the body.
Sami printed out images on textiles merging 2-dimensional imagery with 3-dimensional support structures. What does contemporary queer art look like? What does gender nonconformity look like? Through abstraction and fragmentation, Sami seeks to answer these questions but also leaves them unanswered.
Thank you, Sami!
For more work check the website and watch the interview! :)
Alba Suau is a Spanish visual artist whose work explores the isolation experience, which she defines as the total absorption of the spirit by the object. Alba has studied Fine Arts at Universitat de Barcelona and at École Supérieure d’Art & de Design Marseille-Méditerranée. Her work has been exhibited in both Marseille and Mallorca.
Through her paintings, she searches for a temporal loss, for the renunciation of time — to sink into the non-time of the pigments. Her project during the residency at the Fish Factory has focused on the materiality of painting. With this interest in the material relation between painting and support, she then produced a series of works about almost-shapes. Forms with a certain deviation.
Here, she has also reinitiated a project which has been on hold, in which she takes the notion of isolation in a literal way. She actualized sculptures where the viewer is enveloped, surrounded, by the painting. Thank you, Alba! :)
Ingrid Gaier is a painter, textile designer and filmmaker based in Vienna, Austria. She is interested in poetry and finding images of this sort of written expression. Her first poetry film was about a poem by Jewish writer Rose Ausländer.
She has spent her time here at the Fish Factory working on a new animation about Melitta Grünbaum, wife of the composer Victor Urbancic. They have both fled from Austria because of the Holocaust in Central Europe and managed to settle in Iceland in late 1938. She was a sculptor, philosopher and poetry writer and when she died in Reykjavik in 1984 she left behind a voluminous oeuvre of German-language poetry, a selection of which appeared in the 2014 bilingual Icelandic-German book Frá hjara veraldar.
Ingrid wanted to explore the surroundings and landscape of Iceland, a land that saved Melitta. Her working process here was creating images according to Melitta’s poems, which she then transferred into an animation film. She has spent a lot of her time here going on long walks to the nearby fjords and up the mountain. Thank you, Ingrid!
Erin Conyers is a ceramic and mixed media artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her BFA in ceramics at The Kansas City Art Institute in 2019. She enjoys working intuitively with clay, building sculptural vessels that describe different emotions or beliefs that are often not talked about. For her, building with clay has always been a way to understand her feelings when they haven’t been processed or even identified yet. Most of her works have been about trying to find balance within the imbalances life throws at us or finding growth through constant movement.
Working with ceramic materials and mixed media, Erin focuses on environmental issues, capturing the effects of people’s relationships, living and existing within our environment. Erin is also incredibly passionate about pursuing a completely sustainable and waste-free lifestyle as well as community activism and organization. She recreates objects of contemporary conveniences like plastic, single-use water bottles and modern medical packaging. She emulates industrial processes, such as mold making, that are used to mass-produce cheap goods, allowing her to create individual replications of objects. She fills these molds with ceramic materials from studio excess and waste.
However, the vessels she made in Iceland were about finding growth through prolonged periods of stillness. In Iceland, she took a minimalist approach, something she had never done before. She noticed how everything around her was so huge, complex and vast, yet simultaneously so simple and easy. She didn’t want to make anything that took away from the wonderland spirit of the island and chose to make a series that would fit into the landscape and become a part of it. What came from her time living in Iceland was a series of vessels called Breathing Vessels. The solitude of living in a secluded fjord in Iceland gave her the opportunity to focus inwards and create work about the simple yet complex motions of moving the breath through the body. Thank you, Erin!
Margaux Halloran is a New York-based artist from the United States where she studies fine art at Parsons School of Design. She stayed at the Fish Factory for the month of March where she experimented with oil painting and sculptural works centered around the construction of existing and non-existing structures, and grids. Her project here was to create installation work directly influenced by the natural terrain, and population of Iceland.
In totality, her practice has been motivated by people and their natural allure towards gatherings – such as, an abundance of something in one place, a grouping of mass, faith, ritualistic expressions, existence in the digital world, sexual desire.
She was interested in finding the meeting point between bodies and the natural world. How do people enact agency in themselves and others when surrounded by emptiness? How does the landscape change gatherings? What is the human footprint in a primitive landscape?
Constantine Blintzios is a Greek/British writer. He has a background in music and Contemporary Art and holds an Mst in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. He is primarily a writer of fiction with a focus on the lyric and its’ transformative qualities in prose. He writes about bestiaries and the way emotions can be articulated in the shapes of animals. He is interested in the deep topography of backwoods, backwaters, hinterlands and how history resonates; haunting those that live in neglected and in-between realms. He has had poetry, short stories and reviews published in journals such as Visual Verse, Ash magazine, Paris Lit-Up, the Oxonian Review and the Literary Review. His poem ‘Where I am From’ was shortlisted for the 2017 Martin Starkie awards, he was long-listed for the 2019 DISQUIET fiction prize. As of 2021, his manuscript was longlisted for the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize. His debut novel: The Smoke is me, Burning will be published in 2022 by KERNPUNKT Press.
Constantine Blintzios
He came to the Fish Factory in February 2021. For most of his time here, he worked on a draft for the beginning of his second lyric novel which is inspired by a variety of myths concerning sirens in a setting that draws heavily on the Icelandic landscape and atmosphere.
Sara Sonas is a visual artist who explores materials in relation to their physicality and tactility.
When constructing works, she perceives herself as a receptor; interacting between her environmental and material surroundings while reflecting on existence, transience and our relationship to nature. Observing, analyzing and responding to daily life through dialogue with nature, she reinstates the concept of cyclicity, aiming to find balance and harmony within her work.
During her residency at Fish Factory in November 2020, Sara utilized the spaciousness of the Icelandic landscape to allow her to reflect on the subjects of time, patience and disappearance. Observing ice, she mapped and documented its forms, textures and transmutations through time, with each ice shard representing its own living and changing ‘territory’ for exploration.
Following the transformation of sturdiness towards fragility within the ice, she examined how those characteristics and forms correspond within a different natural material – clay.
Relating to the architectural environment, she juxtaposed our natural ‘landspaces’ – landscaped reliefs (the outdoors) and little corrugated houses (the indoors) by placing them in a micro-perspective, aiming to break the disillusionment that those two worlds are separate.
