David McDonough is a painter and high school teacher living in Queens, NY. His paintings tend to float somewhere between the abstract and the representational, where a repeated cast of characters and a repeated cast of paint moves combine to create images that address natural motifs, problems of humanity, and the condition of the unknown.

His interest in birds, nature, poetry, and science, is often evident in his painting imagery. Perhaps equally evident is his interest in the painting process, and the joy he finds in art making that takes us just beyond the borders of our intellectual lives.

During his time at Nes he plans to look at mountains, to look at birds, and to spend time by moving water.

Follow him on Instagram @dedume.

Jee Soo Shin is a Korean composer who currently splits her time between writing contemporary music and undergoing inter-disciplinary projects, crossing into the realms of performance art and avant-garde experiments.

Her interests span around the issues of originality and plagiarism and embodies borrowed material in her works as a way of displaying satire directed at various value systems regarding how intellectual material is being treated.

During her time in NES, she is working on a piece for a large ensemble commissioned by the city of Inje, South Korea, to be premiered in October.

blog.jisushin.com
www.instagram.com/jeesooshin_composer

Nuala Gorman is from Ireland. She is on a one month residency here at Nes.

While here, she is working with the environment experimenting with alternative printmaking such as cyanotype, rust and eco printing.

Her subject interest is in migration and emigration. Here in Skagastrond she has the opportunity to observe the Icelandic culture while making connections and links with Ireland and Iceland.

https://nualagorman.wordpress.com/ 

My name is Astrid Welburn and I live and work in Zurich, Switzerland. I am working at NES during the whole of July 2019.

My interests cover border areas. I like to explore my own and foreign limitations, the abysses of human representation and their metamorphosis into new beings. Currently my favourite media are video, performance and installations.

At NES, I am experimenting with performative elements for my video about travelling in connection with the ecological footprint.

To transfer the message I create headgears from synthetic material, from found or given stuff. The translation of the message will find its way from head to feet or the other way round.
 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/astrid.welburn
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/astridwelburn/
Website: www.astridwelburn.com
Blog: https://astridwelburn.blogspot.com

“I am Maureen Colomar, from Lyon, France and I am working at Nes for one month. In my process I ask the drawing practice and the landscape representation.

I try to find a conceptual way to represent the landscapes that  I see or experiment. I usually use my photos and sketches as a puzzle or collage to compose my images. The final work might be a drawing on paper, on wall, or an installation….

I came in Nes to experiment with the Icelandic landscape.  This time, my final work  might be a narrative project where I match drawings as a story-board.”

Website: www.maureencolomar.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maureencolomar/?hl=fr

“Wool did it to me. I do not like crocheting or knitting, but I like working with felt. So far, I’ve used felt to create sculptures of heads. Special characters.

Here, in Skagaströnd, a foot was created, a foot with a seagull`s wing, as well as some objects with lost items from the beach.

The next work will be a white cave made of Icelandic wool, which is especially silky.  Creating a cavity is a challenge.
This will be followed by a 2×2 meter large relief in black and white, for a performance.”

http://www.britakaerner.de/

Verena Romanens is an artist from Zurich who works with drawing, painting, and collage, mostly in larger formats.

While in Iceland, she’s drawing inspiration from her natural surroundings – the landscape, clouds, the sky – as well as from Icelandic culture.

Her projects at Nes will gather and express those elements in small pieces, which she’ll take back to Zurich with her. Once there, she’ll give them new life by working them into larger contexts, shapes, or installations.

http://www.verenaromanens.ch
http://www.instagram.com/verenaromanens

Jamie Nadherny is from Washington state, USA. She is working at Nes for 2 months, July-August. Jamie is a multidisciplinary artist focusing her practice on performance and installation.

Her interest is to refer to the body as a site where the development of experience and language resides, and can be used as a receptacle for memory and transformation.

Jamie is currently working with a wide variety of materials and hand-stitching them together to create a costume. Her performance is connecting hybrid identities and the elements of the surrounding environment.
Facebook – Lou Lou Pink
https://www.jamienadherny.com/

Willie Johnson is a writer and teacher who’s incredibly grateful to have time at Nes to work on a number of projects. Most urgently, he’s revising “Hephaestus”, a play that explores questions of disability and sexuality, the limitations of the body, and the desire to transcend them. The play uses the character of Hephaestus — the crippled blacksmith god of classical mythology — to interrogate our notions of disability and work, and what they say about our relationships with our own bodies. Drawing on a variety of classical texts and employing elements of dance and music, this full-length play probes the classics to illuminate contemporary attitudes about gender, race, and beauty. The photos here are from its first staged reading, at New York’s Drawing Center, in 2017. “Hephaestus” will have its next staged reading at LPAC in August, followed by a full production in 2020 at New York’s Rough Draft Festival. https://lpac.nyc/new-events/hephaestus