Artist Residency in Iceland
2015
In 2015 I did a 2 month artist residency in Ólafsfjörður, Iceland. This was my first international residency taking myself right out of my comfort zone and to challenge my usual ways of art making. In the following years I have continued with the ideas that begun here and worked in a similar way in other parts of the world. I enjoy not knowing what I am going to find, or make, yet beginning the process and allowing the materials and the time and place to lead the way.
Ólafsfjörður town
Climate zone: Polar
Transition Zone: Coastal
Latitude: 66.072563 North Longitude: 18.648590 West
The process is to begin by going for walks and taking photos. Then I gather materials from the environment to use for a material/sculpture investigation.
An example of a days collection
I had taken a black countdown shopping bag to Iceland and everyday I collected materials until this bag was full. I would take the materials back to the studio, clean them and lay them out to dry. The next day I would make as many sculptures that I could out of that batch of materials. Once the materials were used up, I would then go out and collect another bag of materials and start the process all over again.
In about the 4th week of the residency I had found some transport and started to go a bit further afield. I worked at the end of the fjord in a coastal transition zone for a week, collecting and creating a stop motion movie. I also collected and took a bag of mostly white found materials (including bones) back to the studio every day.
My transport
Kleivar Corner. The end of the fjord where I worked collecting and doing stop- motion movies.
Last day making the stop motion movie
I was lucky to get this movie completed. It took a week to do, doing one colour per day. The weather sometimes changing hourly, and at one point my tripod and camera got blown over. The day after I took this photo above, all the detritus disappeared!
The next week I used the white detritus and natural materials I had collected to create an interior stop motion, where the detritus fills up the hallway, the stairs and the doorway. Detritus often comes from consumed goods from our homes or from industry, and then ends up in the environment. Out in the environment there is space between each object, but when it is brought back into the home, it brings attention to how much space the rubbish actually takes up.
In the middle of June I exhibited my work from the residency along with the outdoor stop motion movie in an exhibition called Smother Nature. I had made a lot of sculptures and arranged them into groups for the show.
Following the residency I hired a car and drove around the Eastern side of Iceland then through Reykjavik, and then onwards and around the Snæfellsnes Peninsula before heading back to Reykjavik and then the UK.
See photography page for more Iceland photos - Waterfalls and Glacier Ice
