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! :)

https://www.samicutrona.com/

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! :)

// More of Alba’s work! //

@albasuau

albasuau.com

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!

// More of Ingrid’s work //

http://www.ingrid-gaier.at/

Check out the interview here!

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!

// More of Erin’s work //

https://www.erinconyers.com/

Check out the interview! :)

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?

Thank you, Margaux!

@margauxhalloran
margauxerinhalloran.com

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.

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.

Thank you, Constantine!

Check out the interview here:

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.

Check more of her work on the website:

https://www.sarasonas.com

Thank you, Sara! :)

Marloes Staal is a visual artist from The Netherlands. She graduated in 2014 with a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) at the AKI-Artez University of the Arts in Enschede, and finished a one year post-graduate course in 2017 at the Academie in Rotterdam. From 2013 until 2018 she has been a founding member and curator at The Robson ateliers and has worked as an art-education teacher in museums since 2015. Her mainly sculptural work explores our mental and physical relationship with the environment, rooted in ecology, anthropology and craftsmanship.

She has spent October of 2020 at the Fish Factory Creative Centre and was working on two different art projects, both based on the unique landscape of Iceland: its young and still active geological formation and the melting Vatnajökull glacier.

The work ‘Stones: a work in Progress’ consists of 6 stones and 6 types of wild clay from different areas in Iceland. She processed each clay into a slip that casts each of the stones in plaster molds, creating a colorful representation of its geological past while exploring the meaning of deep time in our human narrative and emphasizing the vulnerability of the landscape in creating fragile ceramic pieces.

Her second art project, ‘Third Nature: Walking on Thin Ice’ is an exact replica of an iceblock, broken off from the Vatnajökull glacier and washed ashore at the Breiðamerkursandur, famously known as Diamond Beach. This replica – made with a silicone mold of the original, filled with water and frozen – is a futile and ironic attempt to preserve a small piece of this magnificent glacier for future generations, only to see it meld away again as a museum piece.

Both art projects are an investigation of the consequences of climate change on the landscape and a reflection on the human instrumentalization of nature.

During her stay, she spent most of her time in the ceramics workplace, going on long hikes in the mountains surrounding the Fish Factory, and traveling. She went to the boiling mud pools and lava fields surrounding Krafla in the north and spent some days around to the Vatnajökull in the south, where she gathered clay, stones and the little icebergs.

You can see more of her work on her website http://www.marloesstaal.com/ or IG https://www.instagram.com/marloesstaal/

&

don’t forget to check the interview! :)

Lilien Li is an artist from Hong Kong who celebrated her graduation from the University of Edinburgh and RMIT University with a two-month artist residency retreat. Lilien engages in her practice articulating contemporary context with her focus on the perception of time/space. While she collaborates with multi-medium, her works are transforming her temporal, spatial and cultural sensitivities into diverse forms of art, including installation and conceptual pieces. Her works have been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong, Scotland, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan.

During her residency, Lilien spent most of her time in the Icelandic landscape. With an interest in phenomenology, she attempted to magnify her sensation of time/space through immersing into nature. She developed a photographic series informed by walking and installations, reflecting on her surrounding and personal situations.

// More of Lilien’s work //
lilienli.com

Jo is a musician based in Berlin (DEU). She puzzles crooked tone songs from field recordings. In each of her songs she deeply steps into the world of her sound sources and discovers her own musical terrain by falling in love with hidden and dirty sounds, shaping them sensitively and developing a unique feeling for combining them.

Jo has a strong connection to Iceland. Here, she began her musical project during a trip in 2017, simply because she was not in the mood to shoot stunning Icelandic landscape photos. Instead, she recorded sounds and travelled Iceland with her ears to make one song out of the sounds.

Unexpectedly, Jo has made many more songs since then, released them, and has started to perform her music on stage. For live performances, Jo developed the glasambel. This unique instrument allows her to present her music in her very own way.

// More of Jo’s work //
https://orange-ear.de/index.php/portfolio-items/jo/

Check out the interview here:

Annika Kiiskilä is a visual artist and comic author based in Tampere, Finland. They graduated from Kankaanpää art school with a Bachelor of Arts in 2014, and have since worked as an independent artist, as well as a gallery assistant and printmaker in Gallery Himmelblau.

Annika has been drawing creatures, characters and comics since childhood, and during the last few years has finally followed their dream of doing it fulltime. They have self-published short and long comics both as webcomics and as printed zines, and now they are working on their first full-length graphic novel, which they hope to pitch to publishers in the near future.

While at the Fish Factory, Annika worked on concept art and finalising character concepts for their graphic novel. They also worked on several short comics for their next self-published zine, which will be an illustrated short story collection of sorts. Annika also took advantage of the Fish Factory’s printmaking studio and worked on lino cut for the first time since their graduation!

Nature, folklore and mythology have always been close to Annika’s heart, and she has always wanted to experience the magic of Iceland – a country so similar yet so different from Finland. Being able to come to Iceland and work on their art in a residency studio was a double dream come true to Annika.

Check out the interview here:

Paul Belenky lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brandeis University in 2014 with dual bachelor’s degrees in biology and studio art. He completed his MFA at MassArt in 2017 and spent the next two years teaching visual art in elementary school. Paul lives life in the pursuit of a state of a specific kind of “trolling” surreality because to him, absurdity and play often approach the truth more closely than reality. Paul works in installation, drawing, and sculpture, and aspires to make work that draws both smiles and grimaces.

While at the Fish Factory Paul explored a variety of mediums and process and used the time to research new ideas and motifs to inspire his practice going forward. Paul worked with blueprints found during a previous residency. Drawing false stupid ideas about reinserting chickens into eggs or recycling sausages into pigs over the original designs, Paul would imagine humour and absurdity in the normally mundane technical drawings. Using industrial leftovers from the Fish Factory and on occasion also some leftover fish, Paul would also build mock machines inspired by the blueprint drawings.

Using the time, space and facilities provided by residency Paul also experiment with collagraph printmaking on paper and ceramics, creating a series of prints and tiles inspired by Iceland’s most famous food mascot, the bonus pig. In his first month in the residency, Paul also worked with fellow resident Elle Dioguardi on a collaborative sculpture made from found objects in the factory.

// More of Paul’s work //
https://www.paulbelenky.com/

Check out the interview here:

Bea May Lucas is a visual artist living and working in the UK. She specializes in figurative paintings, the content of which blurs the lines between reality and fiction, encapsulating the viewer in her imagination. She is interested in animals and animal-human interactions – a relationship between separate species. Her keen interest in animals and animal instincts comes forward within her paintings. Her line of inquiry includes how humans are extremely animistic in many ways. She uses past events and experiences, including emotions she has felt, as source material for her work. Intuitively the work is from a female perspective focusing on how it feels to be a woman; in this sense, her artworks are largely autobiographical. She creates her own world within paintings and uses animal and human characters, representative of different elements of her psyche, to deliver her concepts to her audience.

Bea’s practise consists mainly of large-scale oil paintings on gesso- primed canvas, however, she also builds concepts within the work using a variety of different mediums, on varied surfaces. This includes paintings using oils and acrylic paints on paper, charcoal drawings, ink pen illustrations and murals. She established the loose, direct language of her large-scale oil paintings by reflecting on the way she works quickly on paper in acrylic in a drawing style. She uses many vibrant and vivid colours such as scarlets, pinks, and greens, however, despite her colour choices, the impact of her large-scale works are harmonious instead of chaotic.

Bea likes to think that the viewer has a relationship toward these works because there is a connection towards their own mythology. She wants to express her feelings and views to her audience, and she aims for the viewer to be impacted by her artworks because they can relate to the emotions which are on the animals’ faces. She aims for the viewer to feel a personal relation to her paintings influenced by symbolism within the material.

Check out the interview here:

Diane Drubay is a visual artist who uses the psychoactive effect of colours and the construction of landscapes to awaken emotions, sensations and awareness of nature.

// More of Diane’s work //
http://dianedrubay.com/

Seán Cotter is a visual artist living and working in Ireland. He is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and has attended residencies in Ireland, Finland, Iceland and Germany. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland as well as abroad, and is engaged with the artistic community locally, nationally, and internationally., and has attended residencies in Ireland, Finland, Iceland and Germany. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland as well as abroad, and is engaged with the artistic community locally, nationally, and internationally.

In Seán’s work, landscapes serve as metaphors for life and its dramas, whether in turmoil or at peace. Wide-open spaces are able to be contained by a few well placed lines, and emulate the constraints of the modern world, or a persons desire to contain and control their own immediate emotional environment. Blurring the boundaries between areas of light and dark can recall the sometimes difficult choices that are neither right nor wrong.

// More of Seán’s work //
https://www.seancotter.com/

Check out the interview here:

Elle DioGuardi is a visual artist living and working in Boston, MA, USA. She graduated with a BFA from the New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University in 2015. Since then, she has continued her studio practice, showing her work around Boston, Cambridge, and New York, and working as a professional photographer, photo archivist, and studio assistant.

Elle’s goal as an artist is to connect with viewers on an emotional level, by providing a lens through which they can examine their own world. She achieves this by creating works that physically confront the viewer, usually with their own reflection, combined with a text phrase. These works vary from intimate mirror pieces where the reflective surface is etched away by hand, to small sticker installations, to installation pieces made of mylar that confront the viewer on a much larger scale.

During her time at Fish Factory Creative Center, Elle set out to create more of these large-scale installation pieces. She used the beginning of her time at the Fish Factory to work on the content of her text phrases and to hike around the area in search of installation locations. The incredible landscape of Stöðvarfjörður lends itself especially well as a backdrop for installation work, and the collaborative nature of the residency was a privilege to be a part of. On more than one occasion, other artists in the residency assisted Elle in her installation and documentation of work. Elle also worked with fellow resident Paul Belenky on a collaborative sculpture made from found objects in the factory.

// More of Elle’s work //
http://www.elledioguardi.com/

Check out the interview here:

Eva is a multimedia artist and tattooer interested in video, experimental animation, printmaking and fiber art. She was using her residency time at Stöðvarfjörður to explore animation and film techniques. Thematically the work is developing alongside research in Icelandic folklore. Eva is interested in the way cultural beliefs in magical animals can lend itself to biodiversity conservation.

// More of Eva’s work //

ritasalty.com

Check out the interview here:

Dario Zeo is an artist from Switzerland. He stayed at Fish Factory for one month in November 2019. Dario came to Iceland in order to expose himself and his work to an unknown situation. Mainly working in the field of conceptual and language-based art, he concentrates on the process of doing art, which he sees as one single action, constantly shifting, overwriting its rules and including new inputs. A dynamic and process-oriented approach is important for him while working with text as material, simply because text reflects context. Dario understands artistic writing as a re-production in the sense of re-composing and re-contextualizing material. He tries to avoid the production of precious – based on exclusivity and authenticity – art by prioritizing conceptual gesture over product. In Stöðvarfjörður Dario started a new project which includes transferring text snippets from an essay by typewriter.

// More of Dario’s work //

dariozeo.com

Mercedes Villalba is a researcher and writer from Argentina. She studied Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires and at The New School for Social Research in New York. Now she is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, where she researches the commodification of geothermal landscapes. She has published articles, poems, and essays in Spanish and English. Some of those have appeared in The Plant, Les Chroniques Purple, Compost, Correspondencia, Papersky and Eco-colo. She makes zines and small-run prints every once in a while. She was also part of the art and research duo Mejunje, the research group PROTO, and the MycologyMSA collective.

Her ‘Fervent Manifesto’ was translated to Spanish and Portuguese and published by Calipso Press and by No Libros respectively in 2019. Some of her articles have also been translated to Japanese. Her only children’s book so far, “No muy lejos” was published by Periplo in 2014. She currently teaches at the University of California, Davis.

// More of Mercedes’s work //

mpvillalba.hotglue.me

Check out the interview here:

Nick Rasmussen is a visual artist and wedding photographer from the United States, and is currently based in the state of Indiana. Nick studied at the Fish Factory – Creative Centre of Stöðvarfjöður for one month in November 2019, creating photographs and compiling time-lapses of the landscapes there to use as part of a larger, ongoing study of mankind’s connection to nature. During his time at the Fish Factory, Nick spent his days and nights capturing images and videos, using whatever light source he could find. His work portrays a dream-like sensation he believes is experienced most often in striking, desolate spaces like Iceland, which is shown through minimalistic photos with a combination of landscapes, architecture, light, and occasionally, humans. Nick has been to Iceland twice before, and was drawn back as a result of this dream-like sensation he experienced at his first residency last November in Iceland, and the peacefulness that comes with winter here. In Stöðvarfjöður, he is currently working on creating a second book of fine-art images about the relationship between various spaces and elements, a short-film about nature and technology, and a video installation about virtually experiencing nature and the negative effects that come with that.

// More of Nick’s work //

nickrazphotography.com

instagram.com/nickraz00

Check out the interview here:

Sibylle Nagel came from Austria, the land without the sea. Sibylle wanted to get to know to the sea. She collected sea wheat, stones and different items that sea had taken to the shore. Sibylle visited the sea during sunny, rainy and wintery October days, here in Stöðvarfjörður.  She was watching the sea and listening, what the sea was telling her. In the end ´What the sea told her´ became the name of her portfolio.

//More of Sibylle´s work//

instagram.com/sibyllenagel

Gabriela Monnerat and Rodrigo Amim – aka ONZE – came to the Fish Factory to be inspired by Icelandic nature and culture. They also took advantage of this distance from their homes to reflect on the conservative wave that spread recently over Brazil, as well as many other countries. Using mixed media – sculpture, drawing, painting, filming, literature – they conceived a new project. In collaboration with the other residents, they left Störðvarfjörður with the skeleton of an animated short. The audiovisual embryo of a future multimedia installation.

//More of duo Onze´s work//

instagram.com/11.onze

Check out the interview here:

Kathryn Maguire is an Installation Artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Kathryn came to the Fish Factory for a residency for the month of October 2019. She spent her time here exploring the remote landscapes of the East Fjords researching geological phenomenon. Her findings shall inform solo shows in 20/21 investigating The Physical World and Materials. She tested strange goings-on within the Earths Crust aided by Icelands leading Geologists and fabricated and floated geometric casts in the icy seas near the residency.

//More of Kathryn´s work//

www.kathrynmaguire.net

Check out the interview here: