E.H. Thatcher received his MFA from Chatham University, where he served as the Margaret Whitford Fellow. His work has recently appeared in Heron Tree, Weatherbeaten, Soul-Lit and Up North Lit. While in Skagaströnd, he hopes to complete the manuscript for his first book of poetry.
Visit his website: https://ehthatcher.wordpress.com/
Alana Celii is a photo editor and photographer based in New York. She graduated from Parsons the New School for Design with her BFA in 2009, and is currently an editor at The New York Times. Her photographs have been exhibited in group shows in the US and abroad.
Thomas Jackson is an Australian artist and illustrator who was born in Bolton, U.K. Moving to Sydney, Australia as a child, he was instantly drawn to the natural wildlife of this new country.
Fascinated by the local animals and landscapes, he drew inspiration from his new home, as well as scientific plant and animal specimens, entomology and taxidermy.
Today, Thomas puts a modern take on ‘Natural History Illustration’, painstakingly creating smaller scale works for galleries and translating these into large scale public murals.
thomasjackson.com.au
@thomasjjackson
facebook.com/thethomasjackson
Laura Marconi is a visual artist and a Tango dancer from Rome, Italy, residing in Philadelphia, USA, where she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
“For the past few years I have been working on my view as an emigrant throughout my paintings and drawings. Mostly looking at reflections, this subject is an extra- deep entrance into visual perception, eye assumptions, and ways of seeing. All is reflected, so the theme is profound. The assumptions of inherently existing things is meaningful for me to question.
I have also drawn my artwork inside a circle, to symbolize my looking “in” into a different world from where I originally came from, I’m still looking in, or out, still finding myself, a home, my roots. I’m an observer, always eager to learn new things, new cultures, new people. Finding our commonalities, our differences, and the way to reach each other. This circle is also a metaphor for dealing with time, and aging, a “circle of life”.
I have been to several residencies in Iceland since 2013. And I have been coming back ever since. I’m also a board member at Listhùs artspace in Olafsfjorður, Iceland since 2016.”
https://youtu.be/lwS84hPv7YM
Instagram: lauramarconivisualartist
FB: Laura Marconi Visual Artist@lauramarconivisualartist
http://marconilaura.com
Jaime Ekkens has worked for some of the biggest names in television and media in New York including Yahoo!, Hearst, CBS News, Nickelodeon, Refinery 29, ABC and NBC Sports. Having received a BFA from Kendall Collage of Art and Design in 2007, she moved to New York City and successfully pursued her MFA in Computer Arts at The School of Visual Arts. Her independent short films have been screened in international film festivals all over the globe and won numerous awards both in New York, Los Angeles and abroad.
My films tell very personal stories. They are documentary portraits and are very intimate, giving insight into the obvious struggles but also the inner life, hopes and deep feelings of the characters they follow. I think of my films as a collage. The style mimics the scrapbook nature of life. Some will make you laugh, cry, break your heart and heal it.
Hadar Mitz is a multidisciplinary artist. Her works stands squarely in the
tension between nature as we experience it and the human attempt to
force order and definitions on it. In her view, the human desire to
catalog infinite nature is always a failure, entailing the death of the
constant flux inherent in the natural world. In her work, which moves
among the media of collage, assemblage, video, and installation, Mitz
try to gain hold onto un-hold able things, and to communicate an
intimate time perception by works that deal with our experience of
impermanence and infinity, encompassed in our sense of NOW.
Mitz lives and works in Tel Aviv.
http://www.hadarmitz.com/
https://www.instagram.com/hadarimitz/
Emily Kaelin is a painter and mixed media artist from Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. She graduated with her BFA from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, Colorado in 2008, and with her MFA from Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland in 2011.
Using watercolors, acrylics, spray paint, glitter, and other mediums, she creates haunting, surreal images of the monstrous feminine, rendered in a style that incorporates a unique blend of expressionism and surrealism, and is at once illustrative, fantastical, abstracted, and cryptic. Her work has often been described by others as “beautiful, but frightening”. This dichotomy of beauty and the abject, loveliness and fear, fecundity and the void, are the conceptual core of the work.
Her images are created largely through an intuitive, impulsive, and spontaneous process, wherein little is planned out prior to beginning a work. She prefers to “feel” her way through a painting, working with the images in a more intuitive fashion, allowing the process of painting to continually shift and alter the images during their creation.
Paintings are typically produced relatively quickly, in an effort to avoid belaboring the process and therefore creating a final image that appears too dense or overworked. Maintaining spontaneity in the process yields fresher results that feel more accurate to the emotional environments she seeks to represent.
While in Skagaströnd, she will be pursuing more ambitious painting projects with respect to size, imagery, and conceptual content, while drawing inspiration from this unique landscape, the emotions it inspires, and the mythos of the Icelandic culture.
website: www.emily-kaelin.com
instagram: @vvitchinheat
In her mixed media/sound installations Evamaria Müller is interested in
representations of the mystification of nature and science and analyses
different storytelling techniques by constructing spacial compositions
that invite the visitor to engage with its layered components in an
exhibition-like setting. Originally coming from a background in
theatre-/film-/media-theory and stage design she works with sound, video
and text by collecting, analysing and re-contextualising elements of
film and media and creating copies and forgeries in the process.
In Skagaströnd she plans to expand her island-project which reverts to
the historic development of the motif of the island and explore the
textforms diary, logbook and report. The island is a place of isolation,
retreat and recommencement, of the supernatural and the utopia. The
fascination around islands is historically ingrained. For some hundred
years there was a distinct oral tradition that told stories about
travel, discovery and adventure that combine geography and mythology.
http://www.evamariamueller.net
Since 2013 she is collaborating with Anna-Sofie Lugmeier under the name
rendezvous3000.
http://www.rendezvous3000.com
Madeline Clare is a cross-disciplinary artist. She received a BA Fine
Art (2017) and a BA Design History (1990). A trained yoga teacher
(2010) and consultant in Ayurveda (2016), her art practice focuses on
the figurative feminine. Living between England and Australia, she has
exhibited in textiles, sculpture, installation, paint and print.
At Nes, her figurative practice looks to evolve around feminine ecology
in Iceland’s rich geological landscape to realise a ‘maternal
feminine aesthetic’. The ambiguity of a disruptive and creative
aesthetic will be explored through movement, playful performance,
mark-making and photographic documentation.
The intention is to relate the matrix to ecology; to immerse the
feminine within natural settings to identify voice, adaptability and
resilience.
www.madelineclare.com
instagram: madeline.clare.artist
fb: madelineclare
Maryse Andraos is a writer and editor based in Montreal, Canada. Holder of a master’s degree in Creative Writing and a bachelor’s degree in Literature at University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), she has mainly published short texts in feminist journals and collective works. Whether by fiction, essay, poetry or creative non-fiction, she takes an interest in how intimate experience is crossed by political oppressions and how environment and spaces condition speech. In 2018, her work was rewarded by the Radio-Canada Short Story Prize (Prix de la nouvelle) for a fiction inspired by the Me Too movement.
At Nes, she is working on a novel by poems about self-estrangement, where nature and present act as a key to access interiority. She also takes photographs by mere pleasure, for images color and inform writing. Her residency is funded by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and Les Offices jeunesse internationaux du Québec (LOJIQ).
You can read more about her here.
