Its late October 2023
I traveled to Iceland in autumn with two medium sized suitcases and a heavy dose of anxiety. It was my first time in Iceland. I had turned 40 that year and had never traveled this far, alone, and for what would knowingly be a very extended period of time.
The last few years have been riddled with change, all clustered into a chunk of time that felt like a lifetime. Eviction, pandemic, isolation, death, and tragedy. How easy to dismiss these things as part of the human experience, but when they come for you and you are unprepared, the lessons are never clear until much later, if at all.
I began my journey in Reykjavík, a city that holds about a third of Icelands entire population. I spent some time in museums and galleries and walking around. Being a tourist didn’t come naturally to me, especially since my visit to this beautiful country was not for tourism or a vacation, but to attend an artist residency in a small and very remote village called Skagaströnd.
Photo by Esra
“Much like nature, life is very often working in our favour, even when it seems like we are being faced with adversity, discomfort, and change. Just as a mountain is formed, when two sections of the ground are forced against each other, your mountain arose out of coexisting but conflicting needs.
Your mountain requires you to reconcile two parts of you: the conscious and the unconscious, the part of you that is aware of what you want and the part of you that is not aware of why you are still holding yourself back.”
— ‘The Mountain Is You” by Brianna Wiest
Shortly after arriving in Iceland, I was invited to a dinner party at Jasa Bakas apartment. Having only met online, or perhaps once or twice in passing in Montreal long ago, she generously opened her home to me to meet her friends/fellow artists who lived and worked in Reykjavík. During dinner, I was invited to participate in a three day workshop led by Veronica Brovall at Flædi Ceramic Studio in Hafnarhús.
Jasa & Tata
One of my sculptures
Dinner
Me
I was only able to attend 2 of the 3 day workshop since I would leave for Skagaströnd on November 1st, the last day of the workshops. The works created in these workshops were then displayed in Veronica’s “Pressure Point” exhibit that ran 03.11 – 30.11 2023 at Annabelle’s Home. Additional works by: Jasa Baka, Nicole Aline Legault, Martyna Daniel, Victoria Björk, Anna Friða Jónsdóttir, Annabelle von Girsewald, and Gunnar Anton Auðmundsson.
On my last day in Reykjavík I went to one of the geothermally heated outdoor swimming pools, Vesturbæjarlaug. Everyone showers nude in front of everyone in the locker rooms here, something I never thought I would ever be able to do, but I did. If you don’t shower naked, its considered extremely rude and dirty. The hot pots were so lovely and had different temperatures displayed so you could choose which heat you wanted. Adjacent to the hot pots was a heated swimming pool to do laps. I had the whole lane to myself and floated leisurely on my back up and down the lane; staring at the velvety dark sky. The white lights reflecting off the bright teal pool and glowing in my peripheral made the whole experience feel so serene. Little flags strung over the pool spared me any unexpected collisions with the wall. I would later learn how important these pools are to Iceland, and how deeply embedded they are in their culture. I took the bus back to my hotel. Jasa told me the aurora had appeared in the sky on my way home, but I had missed it.
me and Jasa at Vesturbæjarlaug
swan in Tjörnin
flétta
The following day, I left for Skagaströnd. My taxi driver drove a Tesla I didn’t know how to get in because of the flush door handles. I arrived at the bus station and found the #57 and nervously waited. I stared at the bus schedule with tears in my eyes, convinced I was at the wrong stop for the wrong time. A little while later, a kind looking woman rolled up to the same stop. We quickly realized we were going to the same place and she reassured me I was at the right stop. I cried a bit from the relief and we hugged. This was how I first met Kendra, one of the other artists I would be living with for the next two months. In fact, the only other person who was there for a two month stay and not just one. She was kind, chatty; a calming presence in this moment. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that first encounter meeting her.
We transferred in Blönduós and took the shuttle with two other artists who had been on the bus with us. Esra and Celeste. We were greeted by Vicki, the director of NES. She showed us around and then let us loose in the town.
The 1st of November felt like a strange collision of coincidences. On the same day, my friend Françoise died of cancer back home in New Brunswick. It was expected, but still really quite sad. We were merely acquaintances prior to crossing paths out in Grand-Barachois a couple of years ago. We only truly connected around a bonfire at dusk by the ocean back in 2022. We spoke of life, illness, facing death, art… and we shed some tears. When I saw her briefly this summer she was so full of hope after what seemed like a miraculous moment in her healing. She spoke of travel, of finding ways to live again, and all the things she wanted to do. We talked about traveling together. She had so much light behind her eyes; a contrast from when we first connected. She longed to get back into her art, but her battle with cancer would take 10 years of her life away, before it finally took the rest. She was stoked for me to be going on this trip. I saw her in the sunset that evening and took a photo. I printed it out on a black and white printer and hung it in my space for two months.
Celeste out in front of the house
a view from the bus
Francos sunset
Letters from the great beyond
Another coincidence on that first day requires a bit of context.
If you know me, you might already know this story. My dad is Canadian, my mom is American (she is also Canadian now!). My parents met at Club Med in Guadeloupe in 1980 and spent one week together in the sun. They courted long distance for a few months until my dad called her on the phone and asked her to marry him because he was leaving for the Arctic soon for his job (marine biologist) and wanted her to come with him. She said yes, they got hitched and moved to the Arctic where they spent their first year of marriage in an isolated research camp just north of Chesterfield Inlet.
mom & dad 1980
Growing up, I didn’t know my grandmother Betty very well. We lived a country apart and I sometimes saw her in the summer when we would travel south to visit family. She didn’t seem to like kids as much as my grandfather and we gravitated more toward him as young people. I grew closer to her as we both got older. My grandfather would later develop dementia and was moved to a facility with more care. My grandmother would try to go and see him every day but it was difficult with her mobility issues. She felt very guilty and her mental health started to suffer, so she began visiting Canada to stay with my parents for extended periods of time. It gave the family down south a bit of a break from being concerned with her loneliness and I think these trips would help her prepare for what it would be like to be without him, despite how difficult it was.
During her visits I was able to travel east to spend time with her and my family in their round house nestled on the coast near the ocean in New Brunswick. I got to know my grandmother so well during those years. We shared space upstairs in my parents home it almost felt like we were roommates. Since I could work remotely at times, I was able to spend long periods of time out there. She once told me, “if we had been born in the same time, we would have been great friends”. I told her we already were. I feel lucky to have known her. She always encouraged me to travel, but I never did.
I applied for grants for this residency and was unsuccessful. Without funding, I wasn’t sure how I would afford this trip. When my grandmother passed in 2021, there was money left to her remaining children. It had taken a while for the money to get distributed, but in mid August 2023, the cheque arrived and my mother generously offered most of it to me for this journey. Something my grandmother would have wanted and oddly almost the exact amount matching my grant application budget.
Once the other artists and I were released into Skagaströnd, I called my parents to say I’d arrived. They told me they had just come back from the mailbox. Waiting for them were two letters from the Library of Congress…letters my grandmother had written in 1980.
In them, she explains that her daughter (my mother)was living in the Arctic and needed access to talking books because she was legally blind. She writes with care and urgency about isolation, about how important it was for her daughter to have books to read while living so far north.
More than forty years later, there I was, calling home from the Arctic myself. My mother has received audiobooks from the Library of Congress for over over half a century now and somehow these letters, dormant for decades, arrived on the exact day I stepped into that same northern geography.
I don’t know why the Library sent them… whether someone was clearing a file or thought they might matter now. But the timing felt impossibly precise. It felt like a quiet wink from the grave, my ancestors saying, ‘Yes, you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.’
Halló from the lava fields where the horses and ravens roam
I haven’t really created art just for the sake of making art since the early 2000s. Theres always been a reason, a product, or a job to fulfill. I love what I do, I love working with other artists and people, but for the first time in a long time I felt free. Free to be inspired, free to wake up every day and simply create without expectation. It was such a beautiful reminder as to why artists are compelled to create. Its still hard to believe this was my life for two months, as I sit here writing about it.
I worried I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, that I had forgotten how to draw, but that faded away very quickly. I spent the first bit of time wandering the landscape, taking pictures, painting whales (of course) and oceans and mountains, and daydreaming about when I would see the northern lights. It was funny to paint whales here, and I didn’t paint many. It almost felt like maybe the whales had led me here and now I could let them go.
My studio space was so large compared to what I have at home. I felt like I could breathe. There was so much room to grow outward instead of feeling so inward and cluttered all the time. I am so accustomed to working in a small space (what should be my living room). Over the years, my work continued to get smaller so it would be more manageable and I could fit it on my scanner and share it easily online. Its exhausting to make yourself smaller in the world while also trying to be seen.
It was both uncomfortable and wonderful to share space with others. I was living in a house with 4 other women and I was surprisingly completely at ease. Perhaps knowing it was temporary made it easier somehow, or maybe, simply, I had changed.
As we settled into our life up North, the earthquakes in the south of the country were getting worse. Between late October and early November, almost 20,000 earthquakes had been recorded just north of a small fishing town called Grindavík. By November 10th, that town had to be evacuated and almost 4000 people were displaced from their homes. Massive cracks in the earth started to snake through the town and lift the ground 1-2 meters. It was (and still is) a potentially devastating situation for residents. In the most recent update, they said that the town may be at risk of “crack collapse” – meaning that the ground below Grindavík is so unstable now, that it could collapse.
I had never given much thought to volcanoes until I came to Iceland. I didn’t know much about them, but because of the frequent updates about the rumblings in the south, I began watching films about volcanoes and became so fascinated with them. A force of nature unlike anything else. It was quite a day when I realized the lumpy fields I had been walking on were ancient lava fields that were now just covered with moss, grass, and snow.
lumpy fields in Skagaströnd
lumpy fields shown in this documentary not unlike the fields in Skagaströnd
Can you spot my sculpture?
Orange starting to appear in my work
Volcano whale
iridescent paints make it shimmer
I saw my first aurora during my time in Skagaströnd. On November 8th, Kathryn and I watched the northern lights spill over the mountain. It reached across the sky, over our heads directly above us, and continued to the ocean beyond the horizon. No wonder we created so much mythology around nature before we understood the science behind it. We are all so deeply connected to each other and nature; intertwined throughout the universe. I don’t know what lessons I am here to learn in this life, but I do know that part of it is translating the conscious, the physical, and the subconscious world I experience. I thought of my ancestors and all the support and work that led me to this moment. Esra also saw the aurora that night for the first time. It was really special to share that with someone else on the same day. The following morning I saw Venus nestled under a crescent moon.
The last time I saw the northern lights was December 17th, one day before the first eruption in the Reykjanes peninsula. It was mild enough outside to be comfortable bundled up while tolerating the powerful wind. Much of the snow had melted and the ground was dry. They sky opened up and the Gods danced above in the vast open space. I laid on my back in the grass and cried.
five minute burst in the sky – ribbons of pink braided through the clouds
Dec 1st a pink aurora appears
a large face in the aurora, staring at the town below
venus hugging the moon
playing with light
a change in colour after a month of green auroras
a planned power outage in the town
they just live here with this above them like its normal
playing with light under a dim aurora
cotton candy skies
Gifts from the sea and sky
Every day we lost 15 minutes of light. When it was light outside, it felt like an endless sunrise or sunset because the sun just hovered above the horizon. It may have been darker up there but the colours from the low sun were breathtaking. I don’t really mind the darkness though, I could live like this all year round.
The beaches were full of rocks and sea urchin shells and other delightful offerings from the sea. I spent hours staring at the ground as I walked, touching everything and feeling the earth. I want to say it feels like you can feel the history of the land there. Even the horses felt ancestral – and they are! Icelandic horses have been protected here for over a thousand years. They have a very gentle temperament and are so beautiful. They have short legs and a broad stocky build. I related to them physically and spiritually:)
Quiet Stories from the North
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. This trip was very formative for me which makes it hard to keep this brief. I haven’t travelled much and I don’t often share my life through writing and tend to struggle to write about myself. Like many visual creatives, we pour ourselves into other forms of expression instead. Most of my art is a direct translation of how I see and feel in the world. I feel like I am living in some sort of endless cinematic surreal tale; that life is a play and I am an extra in a story about someone else. Maybe we all feel this way sometimes.
For me, life often feels like a heightened daydream. I think this is why so much of my work exaggerates the beauty I sense around me and why I place a lone silhouette in these landscapes; it could be anyone or all of us. I rarely plan my artwork or keep a sketchbook, likely because my process usually begins with photography. In that sense, my photos become the sketches. The piece often changes as it develops, but traces of my references are always there, scattered across the thousands of photos I’ve taken over the years
Watercolours
I left Iceland with more than 20 paintings in various stages of completion, below are some of the finished paintings
Stop Motion Animation
As my other paper dwindled down, I noticed the remaining paper I had was quite thin. I had brought a small light table with me and could see through at least three layers of paper, so I had this ambitious idea that I would try to make a stop motion. I cut the paper into smaller pieces and painted 88 frames and then photographed them in an attempt to make a looping animation of a whale turning into Spákonufell.
I shared my watercolours and some stop-motion work with an art class in Sauðárkrókur, showing how I combine traditional painting with digital work in Procreate. Although we ran out of time to do anything substantial with the material, it was still a worthwhile experience. I was struck by the classroom dynamic: the kids addressed their teacher by name, and rather than respect being enforced through formality, there seemed to be a genuine sense of mutual respect.
In Skagaströnd, the art students were all children who had chosen art as an elective, and their enthusiasm was obvious. They took to stop motion immediately, troubleshooting on their iPads faster than I could keep up. Their creativity blew me away with their creativity and ideas and how they used random objects in the room as props. One student turned a warped blue ruler into a river for a horse to drink from, while another animated a puddle of paint forming from a spilled bottle, painting it frame by frame as it grew.
North American Aurora
Bjarmanes planned to be open for a Christmas party and offered us the chance to hang our work for a little pop up exhibition. The venue had once been the town’s police headquarters, complete with a small jail in the basement (apparently haunted), but had since been transformed into a charming social space that opens only on special occasions. On most Wednesdays they would open its doors and serve alcohol and snacks and the local knitting club. We went there a few times to have drinks, hear music, or play cards.
The evening began quietly, until a bus arrived and released a large group of locals. The atmosphere quickly shifted, and it felt really special to show the work to people who lived in Skagaströnd. As the night wore on, one man grew increasingly aggressive. A large figure, very drunk, stomping around hard enough to make the building shake. Later in the evening, a sudden and violent fight broke out, pulling down curtains, smashing tables, glasses, and chairs, and narrowly missing my work on the wall before the two men were separated. He was later seated in a corner, a fresh drink in hand, his head and ear bleeding after being struck with a thick glass that shattered on impact. I later learned he received eight stitches and entered rehab a week afterward.
It was a humbling moment; one where the romanticized image of Iceland briefly dissolved and reality set in. There is a long history of consumption here, shaped by years of prohibition, trade, and the ways people cope while living in a remote and often harsh environment. It was a beautiful night, even so.
Nearing The End
12/25/2023 14h33
I took a walk at sunset on Christmas day filled with immense and overwhelming gratitude. Only a few days were left before I would retrace my journey from the north and go back to Reykjavík. I didn’t want to leave, but the time had come. My roommate said to me, “don’t be sad, this isn’t the end, its simply the start of something new”.
I carried a small handful of ashes with me to the shoreline and released them into the wind. I thanked my grandmother for being with me on this journey, and for making it possible in the first place. I held space for her memory, and then I let her go.
Galleries
coming soon…
Departure
Reykjavík / Jökulsárlón / Diamond
Eruption
:)
A sincere thank you to everyone who has supported me and continues to support the work I do. Thank you for paying attention to my life and my art, and for holding space for both. It’s truly an honour to share it with you.