Magnificent Dettifoss

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.

Click on the images to enlarge them and use the back button to get back to the gallery overview.

We used the mushrooms for a range of dishes, among them the legendary Champignon Schnitzel.

The Herhusid residency centre team watched us closely for a few days before plucking up the courage to tuck in as well.

Curious locals watch us as we head out on our weekend excursion.

On the way to the sheep roundup at Svinadalur we stopped at Graefekirkja near Hofsos, one of the oldest churches in Iceland. It is is set in a circular pre-Christian earthwork and built from turf, driftwood and basalt rocks.

Also near Hofsos is a modern farm, built using the same materials. Viewed from a few hundred metres away, it melts into the landscape.

Glaumbae is a 18th/19th Century farming estate consisting of 16 interconnected turf and driftwood buildings. We saw it in glorious sunshine and learned a lot about rural life and work, as well as architecture before the advent of steel-reinforced concrete, corrugated iron and other modern materials. Gero and also I indulged in homemade Icelandic pancakes, sherry cake and hot chocolate at Askaffi, an 1880′s Danish-Icelandic building near the farm.

Dotted around the country are small mounds and hills with nipples on top. We decided to investigate:

Here’s our theory: Soil is eroded from the rocky mounds. Birds use the uppermost rock as a look-out and mark their territory. They keep on marking and marking and marking, turning it into the best-fertilised and seed-richest spots in the area – nipples.

Rugged Icelandic countryside looking rather feminine.

Gero happy in his natural outdoor habitat, before we go for a quick dip in the hot spring Grettislaug. The legendary outlaw Grettir the Strong took a bath here after he swam ashore from the island Drangey when the fire in his hearth went out. To find out what happened next, have a look in the popular saga written about him.

In the afternoon, we stop at the sheep round-up in Svinadalur. Here’s one of the first arrivals, showing off the latest in highland woolens.

5 September 2009

Jule and Johanna, who worked as fellow farmhands during Julia’s first stay in Iceland returned to join us for a reunion and to ride in and watch the Bjargsholl horse and sheep round-up.

The horses come in from the highlands.

The Rett is full of new arrivals and the sorting begins.

A farming veteran directing horses to their enclosures.

A horse waiting to be ridden to its farm pastures.

In the afternoon, the sheep start arriving from the highlands, driven on horseback and by quad. They quickly fill up the valley and Rett, the traditional circular enclosures used to sort sheep.

6 September 2009

For the horse and sheep round-up near Bjargsholl farm we stayed at Balkastadir, the home of local farrier Sig Ingvi Bjornson and his sheepdog Fija. Both were totally exhausted, having walked more than 30 km driving sheep from the highlands. This and sorting sheep and horses all of the following day didn’t stop Ingvi from playing and singing with his family band at gig at another post-round-up ball until 6 am.

Walking along the beach the next morning, Fija couldn’t help but round up a few more stray sheep for us.

We went to see Kalfshamarsvik, an old fishing village on the Skaga peninsula. Of the settlement, only turf walls and a lighthouse remain, framed by huge coastal basalt columns towering tall like cathedrals.

Other abandoned seaside settlements.

The weather closing in over the lakes near Hraun.

An forgotten farmstead, somewhere near Hvalnes on the Skaga peninsula.

Ketubjorg with its waterfalls and cliff top seagull colonies offers stunning views along the northern coast.

And we found some huge mushrooms for dinner.

Along the route back to Siglufjordur we were treated to an amazing sunset and saw hay bale land art created by local farmers. The rocky island in the distance is Drangey, the home of legendary saga outlaw Grettir the Strong.

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.

Together with Pieke Bergmans, Studio Libertiny, Raw Edges and Liliana Ovalle I was invited to spend a long weekend in Turin to discuss notions of nature and artifice. We gave presentations about our work and facilitated a design workshop for University students from Turin. The residency was organised by Barbara Brondi and Marco Raino of BRH+ Studio.

The results and documentation of the residency will be published in Interni magazine soon.

A big thank you to the team of the Residence du Parc and to Barbara and Marco!

Luci d’Artista Projects in the city of Torino

Daniel Buren’s “Tappeto volante� (1999) and Studio Libertiny

Two of the students presenting their work

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

The ‘Resilience’ concrete and wool tables on display

My response to the concrete and wool brief set by Design Miami/Basel is based on research into manmade structures that are exposed to the elements, re-conquered by nature and demolished by humans as well as the effects of natural disasters on the built environment.

The concrete and wool objects on show play with a role reversal of qualities we associate with manmade and natural materials. Concrete, which is normally considered a structural and long-lasting material, is cast in two-dimensional forms onto a woven wool backing. Then, in a design process that harnesses destructive force and the ‘undesirable’ effects of decay as a creative tool, the concrete shapes are broken up. Held together by wool, normally deemed the weaker material of the two, the fragmented forms are then reconfigured into three-dimensional shapes and fixed. This process allows the creation of a wide range of unique objects based on shapes cast in a single mould.

A view of my section of the ‘Designers of the Future Award’ display

The high ‘Resilience’ table

The low ‘Resilience’ table

For further information please visit: www.designmiami.com
© Julia Lohmann 2008

For the Saloni di Mobile in Milano we built a workshop in Galleria Nilufar.
Instead of finished products we brought 8 kg of kelp from Japan and Ireland and our tools with us and produced the finished pieces in the gallery. There was a real buzz about the new material and our visitors were very excited to mbe able to see the whole working process and touch the material in its different stages of prodcution: dried, re-hydrated, stretched, varnished, unvarnished.

The Irish kelp turned out to be beautifully translucent and green whereas the Japanese Kombu was much browner and hard, almost like a 70′s plastic.

You can find a video of the opening on Core 77 and more images on Dezeen

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