Month: July 2012

Baer – Wayfinding

I love maps. I thought I’d just admit that publicly!

I think Icelanders love of maps too. At least you’d think so from the quality of the atlases and maps I’ve seen here. Maps are a means of not only knowing where you are and of delineating territory, they are a way of finding a place for yourself in the world.

Here is Iceland, a small island in the midst of the North Atlantic surrounded by deep, cold seas.

The view from the ‘edge of space’.

Though the island is relatively small in area and population, in many ways it’s also vast. The the landscape seems huge when you are in it – the horizon is far away, the mountains are ice capped, there are no trees to break up or soften the views. It’s very easy to imagine getting lost in the snow, turned around in the fog, lost in a storm at sea or simply confounded by the sheer scale of space here.

My first inclination on heading somewhere new is to find a topo map of the region. On my first day here, I was delighted to find a huge 3-D topo map as the central display in Reykjavik’s City Hall. The whole island reduced to the size of a small swimming pool.

Oðin’s eye view

Skagafjöður on the giant topo looking from the North. Baer is left of center. The red patch is the nearby town of Hofsós.

On a map it looks like this.

Detailed topo of the ‘hood’ – see Baer above Hofsós

Older maps give another view of the place and another view on ways to view the place!

Ortelius’ map of Islandia from 1590

Love the whales!

Fearsome Creatures!

Frontispiece from another early atlas.

When my residency finishes I’ll be heading off with Sandra to circumnavigate the island. Heading east to the coast and then down around the south where the glaciers spill out into the North Atlantic across giant lava sand flood plains that flow with water and rubble whenever the volcanoes beneath the glaciers vent their larva into the capping ice.

I’ve never seen such a strange topo map! The glaciers flowing between the escarpments, the huge flatlands stretching to the sea with a thousand small streams taking the runoff from the melting glaciers. I can’t wait to see the reality for which the map is a simulacrum.

Skaftafell

Baer – New Work 1

I’ve been absorbing, recording, sketching and thinking and have started several projects which are in various stages of gestation.

The project that has proceeded the furthest and smoothest to date is a series of detail images of the natural and cultural landscape here which I have been working with in Live Trace. I began this way of working at a residency at Anderson Ranch in 2006 and I’ve used it at the Headlands Center for the Arts and at the For-SITE Foundation in the Sierra Nevada. But I’ve had a chance to really explore and exploit the technique at Baer. I have been surprised by the vividness and bright colors of the landscape here – the water, the brightly painted houses, the wildflowers, the sunsets (of course) and even the horses and birds. It’s not a tropical explosion of saturated color but contained flashes of color which appear even brighter against the generally subdued colors of the landscape. Most of the art I’ve seen from Icelandic artists is also subdued in color, so I decided to focus on the intense – almost electric – colors I have been finding.

All of the images I’m selecting have a fractal quality to them. I catch a part of something that extends much further and concentrate on the interesting detail which holds up under changes in scale. I love the way that Live Trace also creates a fractal quality in the final image. From a distance it’s fairly easy to see what the image is, but up close the larger picture dissolves into complex interweaving patterns of disjunct but interconnecting colors. The image dissolves/resolves into a topographic gradient of color, shade and form.

Here’s one image of nets piled up at the harbor-front at Sauðárkrókur, followed by a detail of the image to show approximately what it looks like full size.

Seine

Seine – detail

Here are a few more images from the series.

Rust

Brennisóley

Toredo

Dried fish

detail

By reducing the complex original image into as few as 5 (or as many as 200) single colors the image becomes abstracted. I’m particularly interested in the way the software algorithm ‘makes decisions’ about where one color or shade ends and another begins and then draws a vector line as a best approximation delineating the different color zones. I’ve been reading John Cage as part of my research here as I’m interested in finding ways of relinquishing authorship and decision making in my work. Live Trace provides an arbitrariness and complexity to these images which is largely out of my control and in doing so it reveals another fractal layer in the images from (and my experience of) the landscape.

The final images are will be 24″ square and I’m working towards a series of 26 images in the final selection – one for each day of the residency.

Baer – Crepuscular landscape 4

The weather has shifted. The clouds rolled in from the north last night and I woke this morning to grey skies and light rain. The land needs the rain as it has been the driest summer on record up here. It’s interesting to see the change in light and the softening of tones that comes with the moist air. It’s also a treat to have a darker night. I slept soundly until an, appropriately termed, Discomfort of Ravens disturbed the morning quiet as they tangled with the local whimbrils and godwits.

Baer – Crepuscular landscape 3

Obscure calculating calendar in wood.

The world is spinning quickly. The days are getting shorter by 6 minutes every day up here. The night is over 30 minutes longer than when we arrived just a week ago. When we leave at the start ofAugust, the days will be 2 hours shorter than when we arrived a the beginning of the month.

Last night, with our first clear horizon for several days, I noticed for that the sun is setting much further to the west.

I can sense for the first time the planet’s drift towards winter when the sun will rise and set in the south only.

I’m thinking about ways to capture that in some work, but a strategy eludes me at the moment…..

I’m inspired along this path by some rough hewn analogs I saw in the National Museum of Iceland.

16th Century ivory compass and sundial, found at Langadalsstrond. Probably bought there by foreign sailors.

Obscure calculating calendar in wood.

Obscure calculating calendar in wood.

Its hard to beat the original caption.

This mechanism is very inspiring. It’s like a whittled Antikythera. Very cool!

As I’m considering the possibilities, I’ll coninue to savor the changing sunset behind Þórðarhöfðí .

Þórðarhöfðí. Sunset at 11pm!

Baer – Out and about 1

Every Sunday our fabulous host Steinnun organizes a day trip for us to drag our compulsive workaholic butts out of our studios and give us a look at the broader context of where we are. Yesterday we headed up and around the Tröllaskagi Peninsular to our east. Skirting the northernmost point, we could see the low island of Grimsey on the northern horizon which sits on the Arctic Circle – my first sighting of the circle from land. We stopped in the little town of Siglufjörðu for a lunch of delicious pickled herring, rye bread and stout and then a long wander through the great Herring Era Museum. The whole ambience was improved (at least for me) by burping up my herring lunch while wandering the displays.

In its time, Siglufjörðu was like a gold rush capital as tens of thousands of barrels of pickled, salted, and dried herring  and fish oil was processed along the miles of wharves and shipped around the world. The museum does a great job of conjuring that time. There are three separate buildings. ‘The Boathouse’ is a huge shed containing whole fishing boats and assorted wharfside shacks dimly lit as if at night which you can wander around at your leisure. You can climb up onto and into the holds of the boats as if you were sneaking around the wharves at night unnoticed.

Siglufjörðu today

Siglufjörðu in the day! (1907)

Inside the Boathouse

Herring shovel in the hold of a trawler

Useful gear on hooks everywhere

The atmosphere in the Boathouse was excellent. The air was pervaded with a sweet, faint residue of gasoline, oil, bundled hemp ropes, and ground fishmeal – yum!! It is like walking into a very ambitious project by Michael McMillen.

There are two more buildings in the museum. One dedicated to the processing of herring into fish meal and fish oil. Sounds dry I know, but its more like wandering around in an busy factory on a quiet sunday afternoon when its all closed down. It feels transgressive, as if you’ve found yourself behind the scenes and out of bounds in something that’s fascinating but hard to fathom.

The last building is the ‘salting station’ or brakki – an original building dating from 1907. It housed the office and dormitories for the workers.The museum’s website says “The old brakki has largely been left as it was when inhibited by dozens of girls working in the herring in the summer. When walking through their former lodgings on the third floor, one can easily sense the atmosphere of the old times.” Its true! The tiny bunk beds on the third floor have hand embroidered quilts, suitcases stuffed under them and early Life magazines strewn about, depicting the glamorous America life. You can almost hear the gossip and laughter as the girls come off their long, hard  shift salting herring.

Brakki from 1907

Outside of the museum is spectacular too!

There are still some nice traditional wooden boats in service

...and out of service.

… and out of service.

We drove back home up the luscious  Öxnadalur valley and under the brow of the spectacularly jagged Hraundrangi.

Hraundrangi

In the foreground is the birthplace of Jónas Hallgrímsson – poet, naturalist and one of the fathers of Icelandic nationalism and independence. You could see how all of those characteristics could have arisen in him from interacting with such an amazing environment.

We drove home along the eastern shore of Skagafjöður to Baer with the evening sun sneaking under low scudding clouds.

Skagafjöður at 9.30pm.

Baer – Some other interesting artists

Since I’ve been here I’ve been introduced to the works of some interesting Icelandic artists. Many of whom draw on nature as an inspiration – especially water.

I find it both interesting and challenging to find a way to work with found materials and the landscape that isn’t trite, sentimental, or didactic. A way that allows for spontaneity, openness, and multiple interpretation. I sometimes look to other artists to guide me (both by their good and bad examples).

I didn’t know of any Icelandic artists till I arrived here – shame on me. The closest I came was (New York born and raised) Roni Horn who has worked extensively here and is perhaps most famous for her On Place series of monographs begun in Iceland in 1982. Iceland has become her lasting muse. Her Library of Water at Stykkisholmur is definitely on my agenda.

Some of the artists whose work I’ve found engaging or enlightening since coming here have been  (click on their names to go to their websites) –

Ruri  

Her Archive of Endangered Water which is currently installed at the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavik was Iceland’s entry to the Venice Biennale in 2003. It’s right up my alley in the way it encourages user interaction and then presents a strong physical experience of the landscape to the viewer, captured through digital means. I wish you had to don gumboots and a rain jacket a la Niagara Falls to enter the space.

Archive of Endangered Water – 2003

Finnbogi Petursson

Another lover of water. Friends in Rekjavik mentioned Finnbogi to me when I told them I was interested in wiring up the landscape and recording its resonances during my residency (more on that later). I like the way he uses electronic means to engage the physical.

Sphere – 2003

Sigtryggur Bjarni Baldvinsson

He has been at Baer and with his great love of streams and the ocean I’m not surprised. He’s the first artist I’ve encountered  who has visually deconstructed water and its movements in a way similar to what I’m doing in my digital prints – but he uses the much more painstaking process of oil painting to achieve his ends. In one catalog of his work the essay refers to his love of fishing and describes the oil paints all lined up as being akin to fishing flies and the act of painting as being a way to catch the river.

Langá River No. 3 – 2008

Ragna Róbertsdóttir

Ragna actually schlepps loads of pumice from the edges of Hekla and other Icelandic volcanoes into the gallery which she then adheres both gesturally and painstakingly directly to the wall or traps within sheets of glass like an ant farm. One installation of black pumice in the huge plate glass window of the Reykjavik Art Museum heated up so much during the day that it smashed the glass window threatening to hail volcanic detritus down on innocent passers by – a man-made eruption. Her work connects to minimalist sculpture but is enlivened and empowered by the raw energy of the materials that she uses.

Lava from Hekla – 2002

Baer – Some first steps to “new” work

It’s always a challenge to start new work in a new place with unfamiliar tools. That’s the joy of a residency, in fact – to be caught off guard and unprepared. To be surprised into new ways of seeing and working. Its also a challenge to find a balance between new ways of working and old. No one wants to be in their studio ferreting away at work that has been in progress back home, but then again no one can start from scratch as if they have no history of seeing and working and making. And who would want to? Our histories are what make us who we are and give us the tools to work fluently – both conceptually and physically.

I’ve bought a limited amount of equipment with me – not that you’d believe it from the weight of my bags. A Nikon D90 (with remote for time lapses and long exposures), my new sound recording gear (Marantz PMD 661 digital recorder, a handful of contact mic’s, Lawrence’s and my hydrophone, and a bayonet mic), my laptop to coordinate all this digital stuff  and my whittling knives and saw as my token woodworking gear. That should be enough?

I started by stomping around the land trying to ‘see’ what it was like. Mark and I dragged back some fishing floats and driftwood on our first midnight hike out to Þórðarhöfðí . Which I knolled on my studio table – just a start to the gathering.

Trolling and knolling

I’ve also been collecting sounds from around Baer – with all my different mic’s. I really enjoy the focus that the mic’s provide. My hearing is not 100%, so the amplification provided by the mic’s and the headphones really help to differentiate the various sounds in the landscape and let me hear sounds that are beyond even the normal human range.

A call on the line?

Fishing for whales?

I’m thinking of using an old shark drying shed close to the water as a sort of musical instrument. It already has some interesting acoustic qualities and I’m pondering how to augment them with fishing line, found objects and handmade resonators to make a more acoustically active zone. The singing of the sharks?

Shark drying shed or resonance chamber?

I need a good hook!

Machine head awaiting strings, found kalimba,….?

Actually it’s just a meat shed, as I found today when I went to do some experiments with fishing line and contact mic’s. There was a nice fresh and dripping sheep carcase hanging up alongside a rather delicious looking slab of fermented greenland shark (hákarl). In Australia they would have been maggoty in minutes – the buzzing of flies would have been an excellent audio element. But here it’s just like being in the cooler.

“The other white meat”

Baer – Good company

I’m sharing my time here with three very different artists and we are enjoying finding resonances and differences in each other’s work and working methods.

We are beginning to talk about collaborations, but are starting carefully with borrowing each others equipment, collecting and sharing materials together, looking at each other’s work in progress and, of course, long conversations.

My colleagues here are –

Mark Hartman a young photographer from New York with a keen and individual eye who shares my love of the crepuscular life. He’s rarely in his studio but out walking the coastline with his large format camera and Hasselblad in tow – his website

Tove Sudt-Hansen from Norway who’s primarily known for her paintings, but also works with drawing, clay and textiles. Like all of us, she can’t be easily pigeonholed and is using her time here to expand her practice. Tove has fallen in love with fish leather and is exploring its potential – her website

and two fellow Californians,

Diana Hobson, originally hailing from the UK but now living in the Santa Cruz mountains. Diana started her art career as a glass artist (a fellow craftsperson!) and has gone on to expand her art practice into photography, drawing, installation, sound, and anything else that serves her conceptual needs – Diana’s Baer blog

Linda Simmel from Sonoma town who works primarily on paper (huge luscious sheets of gampi) painstakingly recreating the flow of water in pencil – her website

There are many examples and traces of previous residents’ works on the land and in the main house. I’m amazed how quickly a shared language of experience and interpretation builds between generations of artist’s who have worked in the same residency. Its as if the culture of art-making itself begins to imprint on the landscape leaving clues as to directions both taken and abandoned.

A large flightless bird or Andy Goldsworthy sneak attack?

Ditto

I’m not sure if other pieces are intentional or accidental?

Intentional?

Some I can definitely identify. Such as this work by the architect and academic John Miller who was one of the first residents here and who connected me to Baer.

John Miller’s meditation on alignments

John’s piece connects two local landmarks. The basalt pile called Kerling south of the island Drangey – which according to folk legend is a troll wife frozen to stone by the rising sun. Her husband Karl was a turned to another pile north of the island but he collapsed in 1755. John saw the now unused, land locked, water tower nearby as the modern replacement fro Karl and set up this observatory so that the new couple could catch sight of each other.

Sight line to Kerling

Looking to the new Karl – he looks a bit like James Bond in this incarnation.

Here’s another architectural-ish intervention that I think was also made by John.

A hide for listening to the canal?

Or perhaps a shelter from the perpetually dive bombing Arctic terns!

Friendly locals, not!

Baer – A crepuscular landscape 2

One thing I’ve been doing so far is making time-lapse videos of the changing landscape and of the sun’s move towards duskdawn. Its the only way I have devised so far to capture the movement and quality of the light. It definitely satisfies the constraint that I placed on myself to ‘be aware of the passage of time’. I didn’t realize when I made that constraint how profoundly imbedded time would be in everything I see and do here.

Speaking of imbedded time, here is the early part of the evening from 9pm to 1pm. Four hours compressed to 20 seconds.

I found that acute angle the sun follows as it slides towards the evening so surprising. Even in the few days we’ve been here the sun is getting lower in the night and staying down for longer. I love the way you can see where the sun is even after it’s gone down from the reflection on the clouds. At the end of this movie the morning was just beginning to lighten towards dawn.

Must be time for bed! Góða nótt!

Baer – A crepuscular landscape 1

As I wander out into the local landscape I’m always excited to feel my senses tuning in to the different (and familiar) smells, sounds, sights and feelings.

I have spent half a century wandering beaches, shorelines and marshlands so in some ways the land at Baer is very familiar and reminds me of many shorelines from my past. But it’s unique and has its own special character – its Genius loci. 

The first thing I noticed was of course the light. I understood in my mind how the sun would move, but it’s not the same as seeing it and feeling it. Seeing how the light changes through the day and the shadows and colors and contrast shift constantly. Feeling that extended twilight. In my experience dusk and dawn are separated in time – opposite moments of the diurnal cycle.

The dusk is warm and glowing and golden, dust filled and tired, tending towards the night, cooling, sleeping.

The dawn is damp and cool and pink and quiet with everything waking up and getting started for the bright day ahead.

Here those two are one, they merge seamlessly into one another with no night in between. It’s as if the summer is the day and the winter is the night and the twilight is  a hint of the season to come imbedded in the season that is here.

Twilight is a derivation from ‘two lights’ and here those lights are the dusk and the dawn.

I have become crepuscular here – a creature of the twilight. The light of the day is so clean and bright and penetrating. The duskydawn is the time when the light is more subtle and indefinable. When the fading sun seems to be of the earth rather than something distant.

Þórðarhöfðí in the predawn/postdusk light

I’m used to the sun moving ACROSS the sky. From east to west. Or as my friend Richard La Trobe Bateman first pointed out to me – from left to right in the northern hemisphere and from right to left in the southern. But here the sun moves AROUND the sky. In the duskydawn it’s due North coming throughout my bedroom windows. Now, in the middle of the day, it’s coming from due South. It moves obliquely at all times, painting different shadows and contrasts on the landscape as it moves.

Baer – First impressions

I’ve been at Baer (pronounced ‘Buy’ with a hint of a rolled ‘r’ on the end) for two long days now and its more spectacular than I dared to hope.

The accommodation is luxurious (in a minimal, modern way). The hospitality of our host, Steinunn Jónsdóttir, is delightful and never ending. The location is perfect and the natural environment is breathtaking. All five artists at the residency have been in a state shock for the last two days as we have struggled to take in the gift that we’ve been given.

It’s hard for me to know where to start! First the studios, then I’ll venture out into the immediate environment and further afield over the next few entries. I’ll keep my explorations and work in progress till a bit later, so that I can continue to experiment, brood and meander for a few more days.

My studio (400 sq.ft.). A small private bedroom and bathroom adjoin with views over the water to the north (and the midnight sun). The easel makes a good hat stand!

Down the sun drenched hall linking the individual studios…

.. to the glass common room facing out on the fjörd Skagafjörður – like being at the helm of a giant landlocked ship.

From the outside you can see the DNA of the building as a restored barn.

The living roof is both contemporary and reflective of traditional Icelandic turf and stone buildings

From further afield both the artist’s studios and the main house come into view nestled at the foot of the escarpment.

Looking East back to the homestead

Baer means ‘place’ in Icelandic or perhaps ‘site’ – an apt name for a place to consider the land and the process of art making.

Looking outwards, the house seems to be totally surrounded by water and mountains. There is the fjord to the south and west, the lake to the north, and the looming escarpment to the east stretching away to the south.

Looking West across Skagafjörður – 2.3oam

The most dominant feature is the huge bare cape  Þórðarhöfðí – like a mythic, giant beached sperm whale.

Þórðarhöfðí at the end of several miles of gravel berm

Due North in the middle of the night (2am), across the lake.

A quick and dirty panorama – fjord on the left, lake on the right.

The light is such an important part of the experience here, with only 3 hours without the sun and those three hours are just a long drawn out sunset extending seamlessly into a sunrise. It is such an  incredibly exciting  experience – like a solar eclipse. I just can’t go to sleep; not because of the jet lag, or the excitement of being in a new place but just for the sheer beauty and strangeness of it.

The only down side is that I haven’t had enough sleep for several days now. So I will post this and resume tomorrow!

Knolling to Iceland

Laying it all out on the bed seemed too depressing and indigestible so you will have to see a distillation. I wish I was Dr. Who sometimes. Infinitely compactible  space would definitely be sweet. Hermione’s bag was the best piece of magic in all of Hogwarts!

My new check-on luggage looks like the space shuttle but in designer colors.

5,4,3,2…..

And the contents of my day pack has finally got down to “schleppable and essential”. To me at least.

What did I forget?

It’s been a challenge and fun to go knolling through everything until only the key pieces (plus some wiggle room) are left. Still not sure about the banjo….

I’m wondering about the tendency to Knoll – named after Florences’ design aesthetic. Some have it some don’t. Tom Sachs of course is the current guru. You couldn’t set it out more keenly. We both love rules and regulations – as long as they are ours!

Tom Sach’s Bullet #2

Next stop Reykjavik!