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Tangible Nothingness

It is difficult to express or photograph the nothingness that surrounds us as we drive through the country. The absence of anything giving us a sense of scale of the landscape is stunning just as the infinite details we see for miles, in the soil and rocks, the colours of the plants, the changes in light, wind and water.

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On our way from Reykjavik to Siglufjordur we stopped – among other places – at Hofsos, a village with a natural harbour which made it one of Iceland’s oldest trading posts. We strolled along the basalt column coastline until our bus driver picked us up again. He drove along at lightning speed, only slowing down for sheep or when a police 4×4 was in sight. Apart from ferrying passengers up north our driver doubled as postman, delivering everything from food for petrol station shops and spare parts for garages to fish for friends in the villages along the way.

This is Herhusid, our home for the next four weeks. The residency centre, an old prayer house and former Salvation Army post, sits right in the centre of Siglufjordur. The town on the northern coast of Iceland was the country’s herring capital until its heyday ended with the world economic depression of 1929 and the decline of fish stocks. Siglufjordur is set on a small peninsula in a fjord with blueberry-loaded hillsides, grazing sheep, ptarmigan and small waterfalls. We’ll explore and will keep you posted.

Checking out the online weather forecast in our flat above the studio.

A survey of contemporary German design, curated by Max Borka at MARTa Herford in Germany, 14. February – 19. April 2009

The Conformitory is designed to make safe elements of nature. It acknowledges our desire to connect with flora, fauna and the environment. However, a thorough risk assessment has shown that any contact needs to be controlled. Visit the Conformitory where we process nature to conform to health and safety standards.

Julia Lohmann & Gero Grundmann

Best known for her elegant lamps made from sheep’s stomachs, designer Julia Lohmann will be resident in the Embankment Galleries’ Studio with Gero Grundmann, for ‘The Conformitory: Nature Contained’, as part of ‘Wouldn’t it be nice… Wishful thinking in art and design’.

Working busily from inside a forensic tent, Lohmann and Grundmann will be manufacturing sanitised, ‘health and safety approved’ versions of the natural world – laminated leaves, perfected branches, nut-free nuts and more…

The Conformitory at ‘Wouldn’t it be nice… Wishful thinking in art and design’, Somerset House, Strand London WC2R 1LA, 27 November – 7 December 2008

For press enquiries please contact: Tom.Coupe@SomersetHouse.org.uk

Julia Lohmann’s 90 m² installation ‘The Catch’ confronts viewers with a vast empty ocean, depleted by over-fishing and our unthinking consumption of marine life. Visitors are swept up in towering waves made of used empty fish boxes taken from Sapporo’s fish market. Unwittingly, they find themselves drifting into its womb-like core. ‘The Catch’ is modeled on an Almadraba, a Mediterranean tuna trap now obsolete due to lack of tuna. It is inspired by Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. The installation probes our fatal beliefs in endless supplies of marine life, in inflated fishing quotas and our reluctance to act on scientific research.

Photography: Yoshisato Komaki