Iceland: Residencies in Isolation
To the majority of us, Iceland, the small European island wedged between Greenland and continental Europe, is never anything more than beautiful photos on Google, plenty of ice (I suppose?), and short nights or long days depending on the season. With only 350.000 permanent residents, there are relatively few who can convey an idea of life there, and even fewer who can touch on artistic life. Paris Lit Up’s Emanda Percival spends half of her time in Australia and the other half in Iceland, and has completed several artistic residencies in Iceland. In this post she shares her experiences with us and gives a glimpse into what it might mean to live and create in the mysterious, beautiful nordic country.
Photos are credited to Emanda Percival.
I’m sitting in a glass dome above Reykjavik, drinking tea in the middle of winter. This is the first day in the past seven where the wind has stopped and the -3ºC is not exacerbated by dust filled icy blasts of air that encourage you to stay inside, or only venture into town where the buildings will offer some shelter. The 10:30am sun bathes the world in pink and orange as it rises on one side while the full moon sets on the other. In this warm glass dome I can see above the city a full 360 degrees. Not far beyond the buildings is either snow covered mountains or silver-blue ocean. Below me, is a small hill covered in pine trees, and across the city I see the empty branches of birch and black cottonwood.
Even here, in the most populated area of the country, nature dominates. Unlike much of Europe where the countryside is tamed and ordered, and wild-spaces are bordered by villages, once you leave the bounds of Iceland’s two cities, Reykjavik and Akureyri, the wild-spaces take charge, and the farms and communities that ring the island seem to be merely tolerated by the natural world.
It’s why people come here, to experience the beauty of a wild country; active volcanoes, glaciers, highlands where you can still disappear from the sight of society for days, and fjords so deep a whale can breach ten meters offshore. Here nature rules and some part of every human is fascinated by it, drawn to it. Most visitors who come here are on brief, ten day tours. They stop, take photos, drive, eat, sleep, repeat. They feel a twinge of that power but they rarely slow down enough to let it in. Artists come to stop a while, to be inspired by the promised isolation and challenged by the practical ramifications this brings with it: availability of materials, unreliable weather, the inevitable confrontation of too much time with oneself, and never having the right shoes.
“Here nature rules and some part of every human is fascinated by it, drawn to it.”
In Iceland, art is an unquestioned part of the culture. I’ve yet to meet an Icelandic artist who doesn’t have the support of their family and community to create – though I’m sure there are some. Crafts arrived with the first settlement and continue today, 1 in 10 people will publish a book, and every Icelandic person plays an instrument, sings, or is involved in a band at some point. Each Christmas Reykjavik’s empty shop spaces become pop-up extensions to galleries supplying unrepresented visual artists a space to sell their works – there are a lot of sales. The national government has an annual grant program – Listamannalaun – for the arts, awarding wages to creators across various fields. Councils and even companies offer grants for multiple other projects that bring the arts into remote areas. Not to mention the 39 registered publishers, 8 annual music festivals (not including general concerts) and numerous art galleries and museums all around the country. All this with a population of just 350.000.
Not surprisingly Icelandic nature is a massive influence on the art created here. From direct, environmentally driven projects like Nýlundabúðin, to the more ethereally influenced music of Ólafur Arnalds. From visual arts to novels the brush strokes of the natural world are visible in everything.
“Here is a country where creators - Icelandic and international - can find space, solitude and creative freedom. Is it any wonder then that international artists seek to come to Iceland to explore and expand their own practices? ”
More than 19 art residencies with focuses ranging from textiles (Icelandic Textile Centre) to architecture (Baer), to multidisciplinary, are located both in the populated centers of Reykjavik and Akureryi and scattered in more isolated communities around the country, making the hardest part for artists choosing where they want to go, and not getting distracted when they get there. As artist Yasser Vayani put it, “my gut feeling was that I would get bored after a week and a half. With the making work part. I would be more inspired to just be in Iceland.”
My first residency in Iceland was with The Fish Factory Creative Centre (FFCC) in Stöðvarfjörður. I arrived in April of 2016 when the light and dark share the sky evenly. To get there I flew from Reykjavik to Egilsstaðir airport, then drove through mountains capped with snow bruised to blue by the reflections of a starry dusk sky. An hour and a half of sweeping around fjords, through mountains, and across rivers on single lane roads, the town of Stöðvarfjörður appeared, tucked into the north side of a stubby, mountain hugged fjord. There are around 200 evenly spaced houses, few fences, maybe 15 trees, and less than 200 permanent residents. But, on the water’s edge squats an enormous building covered in murals, the old fish factory, now a residency studio space, acts as a colourful counterpoint to this fading town. It is also a great demonstration of Icelandic ingenuity and energy; they see the abandoned with a promise of possibility. As a visiting artist with no transport of my own, and with the nearest supermarket a 45-minute drive away and an hour to the nearest hospital, there was no escaping the fact, this town I’d chosen to spend 2 months writing in, was pretty damn isolated.
Photo of the factory where the The Fish Factory Creative Centre (FFCC) residency takes place.
FFCC has 2800 square meters of cavernous space in which to create. When the fishing industry moved to another fjord, a small group of inspired artists reinvented the factory space as an art residency and the analogue recording studio, Studio Silo. The space allows for one of the most comprehensive combination of studio spaces I’ve seen in a residency: metal work, woodwork, shared mixed media and ceramics. A creative can come with one project in mind and discover new passions in different mediums. Although it is not a supported residency (very few in Iceland are) the selection process was considered and the artists I was in residency with were talented, focused and driven. We could attend daily meetings to discuss overarching issues like: grocery trips, where to find materials, cultural questions etc, but otherwise we were left to ourselves to progress, procrastinate, create and develop as we liked.
In my second residency – Art Attack, a short-term residency now closed – this lack of structure and specifically project support was something I found difficult, particularly as the residency requirement was to develop community-centric art. Now, having lived in Iceland a few years I understand that the lack of support and organization I felt in both of my Icelandic residencies is found across all industries and is what I’d call a cultural quirk. Unlike in many more populated places, with an overload of processes and red tape to break through, projects in Iceland can come into being very quickly. Sometimes this means the idea gets ahead of the practical, which on occasion, can leave the international artist feeling like they are floating in a vacuum of misinterpretation.
“On the plus side, this lack of cultural red-tape means reaching out to established artists to collaborate is completely acceptable. In Iceland you get to use your initiative and you’ll not be discouraged for doing so. People may shrug, possibly look at you like you might be more than a little insane, but ultimately say why not, give it a go. Then it’s on you. ”
My own project was community based. It took a week or two of panic and perseverance, but once I found that one person in the community who was willing to trust me, everyone opened up; each giving me my next target to interview. This need for self-sufficiency is not for every artist, but for myself and many others it developed a new level of professionalism and I came away with a little of the Icelandic determination to go forward regardless of the seeming insanity of the idea and the hurdles thrown in my way.
Like FFCC most residencies programs in Iceland are privately run and housed in repurposed buildings, Skatfell and Heima residencies in the small, vibrant art-centric town of Seyðisfjörður are both in historic buildings, as is Húsið on the outskirts of Patreksfjörður. Baer Art Centre in Skagafjörður, northwest Iceland constructed their studio buildings on the footprint of the family farm’s old cow and sheep house and a barn. Being encapsulated in an active horse farm Baer’s artists find themselves even more connected to Icelandic nature than those who choose small communities as a base. The added isolation dictates when Baer can accept residents, with dark days in winter and all kinds of weather, they operate short two-week residencies and tutored workshops only over summer.
This repurposing of space restricts the number of artists attending – the most I have shared a space with was seven – and keeps everything intimate. In my opinion this is one of the highlights of an Icelandic residency as it facilitates lasting connections and friendships. Now, with the pandemic, isolation has taken on more weight – when it is required rather than chosen we are faced with ourselves in a very different way. An Icelandic residency may be a chosen isolation, but the support of your fellow artists is essential for both clarifying projects and for maintaining mental stability. Some artists flounder in isolation-shock and leave after only a portion of their residency, but the great majority push through and discover a new sense of their own practice, build lasting friendships and international connections. This is common in most art residencies, but in my own experience, and the experience of other artists I’ve spoken to, something about Iceland intensifies this bond. Maybe it’s because this small group of 2 -7 people are your main support for navigating the Icelandic experience, or it could be because they are your only entertainment on days where the weather is so bad you can’t walk to the studio.
Sitting comfortably in a city with warm feet and readily available supplies (even in lockdown) all of this sounds romantic, immense and freeing, and it is all of those things. But it can also be intense, overpowering and overwhelming. You can be confronted not just by the physical world, but the silence, the reality of having no way to get anywhere unless you have a car (i.e. no escape to distractions), and some of the most changeable weather systems you’ll experience. An artist visiting Seyðisfjörður last October told me, “I had no idea how bad it would be. I mean rain, snow, sleet all in one day, but the worst of it was the wind. You could never hide from it.” One of my favourite Icelandic words is vedurteppt, which loosely translated means, ‘I couldn’t come because of the weather.’ Visitors should take this idiom literally. Fjords like Seyðisfjörður still get ‘locked in’ by snow at least once every winter. Flights across the country are regularly cancelled because of storms. And then you get days like today, where the pink of sunset and sunrise blend into each other, the air is still and cold and in the distance, you can see glacier and horizon fading into one pale blue line.
“One of my favourite Icelandic words is vedurteppt, which loosely translated means, ‘I couldn’t come because of the weather.’”
For many artists the grandeur of nature, cultural quirks, and intense everything is a confrontation with their artistic practice and their sense of self as a creator. An art residency in Iceland will never be what you expect. When does anything ever meet the glowing halo of promise? It will, however, always show you something about yourself, even if it takes a while and a return to a city with reliable sunshine to appreciate that.