Sunday, August 7 at 16:30, Herðubreið
Skaftfell warmly welcomes Rachel Simmons, our artist in residence for the month of August! This Sunday afternoon Rachel will show her work FLOCK in the Herðubreið gallery and introduce her practice and the workshop she will host later this month for children and parents in Seyðisfjörður.
Rachel Simmons is an American artist-educator who teaches foundations, printmaking and book arts at Rollins College, an innovative liberal arts institution in Winter Park, Florida. She began her teaching career after earning her MFA in Painting & Drawing from Louisiana State University. Rachel specializes in book arts & printmaking, and her diverse studio practice is informed by both environmental activism and personal narratives. In her socially engaged art projects, Rachel asks community participants to think critically and creatively about our relationship with nature. Endlessly curious about the natural world and our relationship with it, Rachel often collaborates with scholars from other academic disciplines and members of her community to create new work. She has traveled to Antarctica, Iceland, Namibia, the Galapagos Islands and many of the US National Parks to research environmental issues pertaining to these projects.
FLOCK is a socially engaged art project by Rachel Simmons that encourages communities to see their daily interactions with neighbourhood birds as opportunities for creative expression. It’s comprised of more than one hundred relief prints – cut into a variety of bird silhouettes – each one inked and printed by participants in printmaking studios across the United States. The bold patterns and rich colours represent each participant’s creative choices, but together the birds that make up FLOCK become a collective expression of our relationship with nature. You can learn more about the project by visiting www.rachelsimmons.net. Rachel will offer this two-part workshop for children and parents, involving birdwatching and printmaking, later in August in Seyðisfjörður.
