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From the moment you get on the purple WOW Air airbus A330-300 to Iceland, it’s apparent that the Reykjavik based company is selling you an experience.  The cabin lights shift from green, to blue, then yellow, mimicking the northern lights that are common in northern countries. The flight attendants are dressed in cardigans and skirts, intensely purple from top to bottom. The pocket in front of you has maps and magazines talking about different Icelandic excursions and destinations, listed with times, costs, and duration.

(www.airplane-pictures.net)

The Blue Lagoon tour is among the most popular and is a geothermal spa on a lava bed. Its website invites us to “experience the wonder” of it’s beauty and vastness. On the golden circle tour, guests are reminded that Iceland is tectonically active, with geysers that erupt several times an hour, a volcano crater, and Thingvellir national park, a long rift where the tectonic plates of North America and Europe meet. On the Into the Glacier tour, one can go by snowmobile or ice vehicle to the ice caves that have been hollowed out at the centre of Icelandic glaciers.

 

(www.bluelagoon.is)

 

On the Into the Volcano tour, guests are lowered into the centre of a volcano that erupted 4000 years ago. Both are considered “extremely family friendly”, with only the most basic winter gear required for full enjoyment (and a camera, for those “indescribable” moments!). The tour bus and the extreme looking all terrain vehicles are equipped with full WiFi and USB charging ports, with comfort being a top priority. Behind these experiences is a perceived danger, presenting the landscape as powerful, rugged, and awesome. Iceland has a reputation for being a beautiful place, but I believe that this description of Iceland is miscategorized, as the primary draw to the Icelandic landscape is sublime.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime. (1757) Burke argues that the sublime and the beautiful are often considered to be opposite ends of a spectrum but are in fact unalike. He defines both as stemming from passions. Beauty stems from our passion of love, as we find beautiful qualities in flowers, in human bodies, and in pleasing landscapes. Things that are beautiful are often smooth, delicate, and pleasant. The sublime stems from our passions of fear, dealing with the rugged, the unexplored, and the dangerous. Sublime characteristics are found in vastness, infinity, and magnificence. The sublime instils awe by reminding the viewer of an imminent danger and the finality of death, without an actual present danger.

(Wikimedia Corp)

             In Reykjavik, I made a friend who later added me to Facebook. She was a lawyer working in the United States and was kind enough to offer me drives to different places in the mornings. She had rented a four-wheeled vehicle to travel on Iceland’s most extreme roads, which allows one to see the most rugged parts of the land. Her posts come across my Facebook feed and present a slew of hashtags, such as #detox #bliss #serenity #bucketlist #wanderlust. The term wanderlust is seen in psychology as the desire for development by experiencing the unknown and confronting the unforeseen. The images presented with these hashtags include vast landscapes and pictures by roaring waterfalls and rocky cliffs. Google, Facebook, and Twitter searches present many more photographs like this, with various travellers presenting themselves near similar Icelandic staples. These sentiments are echoed in both online and print advertisements, such as the ones available in the seat pocket of the big, purple WOW Air Airbus 330-300.

(www.icelandreview.com)

Beauty seems to be only a small consideration of the tourist gaze on Iceland. It appears that those who travel here are far more concerned with an experience, something that transcends imaginations rather than pleases eyes. The concerns here are undoubtedly sublime, placing the visitor face to face with the awesome and harsh realities of natural forces.

We had parallel knitting workshops at the Icelandic Textile Residency  for beginners — some of our crew had never before held knitting needles — and those who were a little more advanced. Such fun and BIG thanks to Jóhanna Erla Pálmadóttir and Gudrun Hannele Henttinen  for their knowledge, patience and good humour!

 

It took a few days for me to settle in and realize that it was indeed a textile residency that I had signed up for. On one level I knew that this wonderful field school opportunity would mean a month of working with fibers… but I don’t think that my hands knew and understood what they were getting into. Three days in, after spinning wool and weaving tapestry in workshops, I found that I could not let myself sleep until I was finished the small tapestry I had started earlier that day. My hands just wouldn’t stop and not only that, but some nearly manic compulsion had awoken in me to Produce!

“Produce! One more row! Keep at it! One small step at a time!!” said my inner voice beating the drum in my ear.

The midnight sun did not help to calm this drive. Our studio at the Textílsetur has windows all along the western facing wall and we are so fortunate to be able to watch the sun setting over the sea as we craft. Those of us who caught the weaving bug worked into the night as the setting sun gradually filled the studio with an orange glow.

It was then that I finally realized (and relaxed into it). At last, here in Blönduós for the month of June, I had time to craft. A passion for fibres that has literally been stuffed into closets and put away because there is simply not time for quilting and tailoring in the busy school year, finally taken off the back burner and set to boil.

Fibre art is a time-based labour. One stitch at a time amounts to many. The slow growth can be addictive. All it takes is time. Just give your time.

 

Many days of labor are contained within one sweater, especially if we consider all of the steps required to transform wool off the back of a sheep into a fine yarn for knitting. There is an artist here in residence that is doing exactly that. Deborah Gray (deborah.gray7 on instagram) is cleaning, carting, dying and spinning the wool, everything short of shearing the sheep herself. And perhaps now this work is considered extraordinary, especially since a short walk to the grocery store would allow her to purchase all the yarn she needed, in whatever colour, in whatever thickness. What is now a unique and perhaps meditative hobby, used to be an essential skill. “It was for subsistence. If you wanted to be clothed, if you wanted rope or fabric for your sails, you needed to know how to work with fibres and you put in the time.” she says.

Industrialization has surely sped up the processing of fibres as well as removed the obligation of holding fibre skill and knowledge in our hands. But in our choosing, if we find a rhythm with wool and wheel, a spinning wheel can be a time machine. A warp and weft can arouse a body memory older than the bones in our hand and an age-old craft can be followed back on a thread many generations. But it takes time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While attending knitting festival in Blönduós last weekend, I was intrigued by the colourful leather I saw, which I believed to be snake skin. Later on, I spoke to Hjördís Þorfinnsdottir who made some colourful buttons from the leather and I found out the material was actually salmon skin. She showed me how to make a button from salmon skin step by step.

After that, we conversed and she informed me about a tannery centre in Sauðárkrókur, about 40 minutes bus ride from Blönduós, where she bought all the salmon skin displayed at the festival. After the festival ended, I decided to go to the only tannery visitor centre in Iceland, Gestastofa Sútarans in Sauðárkrókur with some Concordia students and Deborah, a residency artist/teacher from Scotland.

At the Gestastofa Sutarans, we were greeted by Marianna Margeirsdottir. She gave us a tour where the fish tanning process took place at the back of the visitor centre shop.  It is also a place where staff and workers process the skin of lamb, horse and sometimes seal and other skin, according to the customers’ order.

The tanning process for fish skin takes about a month, because every fish is different – different texture, oil content, etc. The fish skin that the Gestastofa Sutarans use are wolffish, perch, salmon and cod. None of these fish are on the endangered species list.

The fish skins are purchased from commercial fisheries and shipped in boxes. The combination of chemicals are used to remove all the fish oils so that there is no fish odor anymore. Through a month chemical and mechanical process, the skins are churned, soaked, fleshed, vacuum dried and dyed. The special tanning treatment prevents the fish leather from becoming stiff, once all the oil from the skin is taken out. Unfortunately, we could not see the earlier processes of tanning the skin. The following pictures are half of the processes of fish tanning that Marianna had shown us.

The fashion world is in constant flux, always changing and innovating. Within the last couple of decades, one of the most exciting trends to have emerged is the use of fish skin as leather. Fish produce a variety of textures from the vast amount of species, which has astounded leather specialists around the world.

Working with demonstrations from master weaver and teacher Ragnheiður Björk Þórsdóttir (centre), Concordia University students learn tapestry weaving at the Icelandic Textile Center. This was just the beginning of creative adventures to come!

Sitting in the fantastic weaving studio at the Textílsetur Íslands in Blönduós, enjoying the vast panoramic view of Northwestern Iceland, I think about the wilderness, the roughness and the isolation of this small town.

I start to wonder about times before the roads and modern heating systems. The times where there was no road no. 1 connecting the north to the south and the villages to towns. How did the first settlers of Iceland adapt to the fresh, blowing wind that is still so chilly, even in mid-june?

Jóhanna Pálmadóttir farm, Icelandic sheep, Photo: Ryth Kesselring 2018

Looking at the scenic seaside my thoughts start wandering and I imagine myself here in a different century. Even if I know that Blönduós was founded during the 19th century, I imagine myself here at the times of the Vikings, arriving after an epic journey on the cold and rough Norwegian sea somewhere between the 9th to the 11th century. Trying to adapt to the isolated cold winter season on an Island surrounded by ice and and snow.

Weaving studio at Textílsetur Íslands, Photo: Ryth Kesselring 2018

Looking at the old-fashioned floor looms around me, I am imagining the weavers of the past creating soft and warm fabrics out of wool to keep their loved ones warm. The very same wool I have been learning to tame since the day I arrived in Iceland. The wool that seems to contain the beautiful wilderness of this Nordic country, and that materializes the rawness of its surroundings. The wool that comes from the northern Europe short tail sheep, brought by the Vikings from Norway and isolated on this island so that it became one of the purest breeds of sheep in the world. The wool that I am learning to spin, that I have dyed with different Icelandic plants and that will be my chosen material for this month of artistic research and exploration.

Continue reading “Epic Wool”

As Jóhanna Pálmadóttir, director of the Textílsetur, drove us to her sheep farm, she told us about the fishers who rent out her lake. When we asked if she gets some fish from the lake as well, she jokingly added, “there is no darkness here, so I can’t go in the night and steal the fish when they aren’t looking”. Although this was a jest, it did get me thinking about our relationship with the dark. Night is the time for loud parties, movie nights, and theatre. As a puppeteer and performer, I quickly became interested in the interpersonal relationship one has to the sun and its patterns. How does living half of the year in sunlight and the other in darkness affect people’s lives?

A quick chat with a Blönduós local in the hot pools on Friday evening gave me some insight. He told me that kids were often taught about bedtimes with blackout screens in their rooms, and bedtime/rules changed depending on the family. This seems to hint at the necessity of a sort of separation between the internal habits and the external world.

That being said, some research on blogs documenting human experiences living in 24-hour-sunlight has also revealed the amazing flexibility of humans to adapt to their environment.  Trausti Thor Johannsson, an Icelander living in Scandinavia, wrote that the light and dark of the summer and winter months never bothered him growing up since it was all he had ever known. It was only later on when he had moved away and would return to visit that he felt some negative consequences during the dark winter months such as grogginess and irritability[1].

Since arriving in Iceland, I have had many different emotions in response to the brightness outside my window. I’ve woken from a nap and even though I had slept three hours, the sun would make it feel as if no time had passed. It can be disruptive for certain activities, like watching a movie on a computer screen. It has also proven a new challenge in designing a puppetry show, as the focus light needed in theatre is very difficult to achieve.

On the other hand, the midnight sun can be extremely liberating. Morning walks can be taken at any time during the day or night. Yoga on the lawn is equally possible at 9 am or 12 am. Suddenly, the patterns and habits I make aren’t connected to the sun going down.

As an anonymous Northerner wrote humorously on the blog mentioned above, “If you are out on a sunny evening, you tend to forget time, and you end up coming back from a hike at 3am. or 6am. Who cares. As for meals, who cares if it is breakfast or dinner. Or 2nd dinner.”[2]

There is definitely a balance that needs to be achieved when living in 24-hour sunlight. It has wreaked havoc on my sleep schedule. Many of our group commented on how the sunlight has altered their internal clocks during our class. Dave mentioned, “Everyone I’ve talked to is having some weird experience with sleep”. It does become necessary to regulate your habits and activities regardless of what the sun is doing, oftentimes leading to the external and internal being extremely separate. There we are, tucking ourselves in for a goodnight’s sleep while the birds chirp loudly as if it was already 6am.

This can also be true with emotions and feelings. During our class yesterday, Kathleen spoke of the 24-hour-sunlight stating, “You really notice what is going on inside of you…if I’m feeling anxious it’s not an external cause, but something going on in my own mind”.

I wrote a poem about this experience of 24-hour-sunlight; the separation between internal emotions and habits and the outside world.

Light/Dark

written on June 12, 2018

Without dark there is no you
only seas of blue
blue being what my eye lets in
when it lets in everything

without dark there is no day
no way to take the pain away
it cycles in and out like waves
a painful memory

without day there is no dawn
no way to justify a yawn
no up, no down, its all around
the birds just stay awake

without change the sky just makes
the colours of a mood
it’s sometimes bright, it’s mostly light
it’s occasionally rude

it ebbs and flows as the ocean goes,
it’s rough, it rows
it moves and throws
it can throw me all around
but without dark
there’s no way to mark
I’ve even hit the ground
without day there is no way
the birds can make a sound

and so it goes, it spins and throws,
everything to keep me on my toes
and no one know where the dark goes
until it shows its face
perhaps it grows straight from my woes
the darkness out of place

 

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-live-in-places-with-24-hours-of-full-daylight-or-darkness-How-is-life-affected-due-to-these-extremities-Is-there-visible-impact-on-business-governance-and-essential-activities

[2] ibid.

Iceland boasts a landscape unlike any other. A glance outside a window of the Icelandic Textile Center, previously the Kvennaskólinn in Blönduós, offers a view of black-sand beaches, green vegetation, snow-capped mountains, and infinite sea. This vast beauty is something which many travellers to Iceland eagerly anticipate, myself included. It was my intention, however, to explore the more intimate aspects of the majestic natural landscape, stopping to smell the proverbial flowers as I attempted to absorb as much of my surroundings as possible to ground myself in this new environment.

Armed with my iPhone and a 15x macro lens, I gingerly crept around the coastal area of the Textile Center on my first weekend in Blönduós. The following photos capture some of the fascinating objects I came across on my walks, for which the macro lens provided a novel, almost microscopic perspective. Online research and conversations with the centre’s director, Jóhanna Pálmadóttir, provided further insight into their significance.

Lichens, or skófir, are among the most recognizable natural life in Iceland, with over 700 species across the country. These can be categorized into three groups, based on appearance: fruticose, foliose, or crustose lichens. The lichen pictured most likely belongs to the latter category as it grows as a crust on textured surfaces such as rocks, soil, or tree bark. Although leafy lichens are habitually confused for mosses, they are in fact comprised of multiple organisms which can be more easily appreciated at this close range.

This fish bone likely came from an Atlantic cod, a noteworthy fish in Iceland. Historically, it has been the most important marine resource in the country, appearing on the Icelandic coat of arms between the 16^th and 20^th centuries. The cod is a fast-growing fish and can develop to a length of one meter with few predators, humans aside. This cod was not so lucky as indicated by its bones.

Blue mussels are commonly found in shallow Icelandic waters. They attach themselves to hard surfaces and will remain there as the tide recedes, ultimately drying out and perishing. As a food source gaining popularity with humans, one must be aware of the potential toxicity when the mussels ingest a certain algae bloom. These blue mussels appear to have provided a tasty treat for some aquatic resident.

Usually referred to as kelp or þang, brown algae comprise most of the large algae found in shallow waters and on the Icelandic seashore. Although the dominant species of seaweed on the northern shore has been identified as knotted wrack, the algae pictured looks more similar to a variety of sea belt which tends to live in saltier conditions. They grow in large, underwater forests, acting as protection for small or young animals and food for others.

For the above images, careful posing and Photoshop were not needed nor wanted, as I wished to digitally preserve, as best I could, exactly what was offered. With each encounter, a new wave of excitement surged through me, a hidden treasure concealed in plain sight, waiting to be discovered by a wandering and wondering visitor. How many people had taken this same path and seen this same landscape before me? How many had stopped to enjoy its intimacy as well as its grandeur? These photos serve as a reminder to remain aware of the many wonders on display, for those who are willing to take a closer look.

 

Total number of days it took to realize the moon is missing: 13 

 

I didn’t quite make note of the gesture when saying goodbye to the moon—she who is the major catalyst for the form of solitude I enjoy most, in which my own energy is reflected back to me, othering me. The moon splits me so that me and I may reconnect. She, Mother, instigates a playdate. It is Gemini season, a time defined by twins of the self. I have felt intellectually stunted and out of place, off my feet, in the air (literally, as the wind has situated itself as the primary weather condition on my radar visually, audibly and materially, not to mention the regular experience of shifting altitudes so rapidly yet subtly that I’m hardly conscious of it.) Does the moon, like anything, truly exist when beyond my registry? What does it mean to be castrated sensationally from an element so basic, especially when it flies beneath one’s nose for nearly two weeks’ time in the shadow of “minor”[1]? 

Gemini also belongs to the element of air, which rules abstraction, zippy thinking, problem solving and communication, extracting balance from an environment’s Ups and Downs. Perhaps its role, in the absence of the world’s most prominent environmental up and down, is to challenge me to make and fill crevices beyond those which have tactile presence—to use and live within the parts of my mind rooted elsewhere rather than replacing them with all things Iceland.

 

I have decided it is a good time

to hone my French.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] In reference to Anne Carson’s “On Major and Minor”, from the collection Plainwater. “Major things are wind. Evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the names of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct time” (33-34).