For the past three weeks a group of international artists have participated in a thematic residency, entitled Printing Matter, at Skaftfell. During this period the artists have explored the art of print and book making both on a practical and conceptual level. The process has taken place in, among other places, the Technical Museum of East Iceland and is lead by Danish artist and graphic designer Åse Eg Jørgensen with the assistance of Litten Nystrøm, an artist based in Seyðisfjörður.
The Printing Matter residency aims to create a platform for exchange, discussion and collaboration in relation to printing and book making as well as sharing professional interests in the topic. The process started with introductions where each artists presented their background and artistic practice, followed by a simple printing project that each participant resolved in their own manner. Hereafter the artists started working on the final goal of the workshop: to make their own artist’s books.
At the Technical Museum the artists had access to three hand-driven presses,once donated to the museum by the late Dieter Roth; proofing press, intaglio press and lithographic press, and it’s safe to say that for the past weeks the creative juices have been flowing.
After many tests and experiments guests are welcome to view the results in the Technical Museum this Monday, February 26, from 16.00-18.00.
Children are especially welcome and can try a simple printing technique in a special kid-friendly corner.
About the artists
Ash Kilman makes art, books, gifts, mistakes, apologies, food. She is from New Zealand but currently lives in the Netherlands. In 2017 she obtained an MA in Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Her work occurs as arrangements of printed text, live and recorded speech, found objects and small sculptures, purpose-built displays and architectural alterations. These constellations inhabit galleries, local museums, private homes, and public space. They exist for short times, enjoying a tense temporarily, relishing their own portability and economy. Most often, they respond to the concrete contemporary reality of larger systems—specific urban infrastructures, architectural styles, museum collections—as these guide how we exist together in space and history. http://ashkilmartin.net/
Christiane Bergelt, born 1982 in Marienberg/ Saxony. She received her Master in Fine Art/ Painting from Chelsea College of Art &Design in London in 2010. Beforehand she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and became Meisterschüler with Prof. Thomas Hartmann. In 2008 Christiane Bergelt was awarded a scholarship of The German Academic Scholarship Foundation. After the government-funded residency at Schloss Wiepersdorf in 2014, Christiane Bergelt spent a one month residency at Künstlerhaus Ahreshoop by the Baltic Sea. Supported by the German Academic Exchange Service she took part in two artist-in-residence-programs in Iceland in 2015. In 2017 Christiane Bergelt received a promotion for young artists granted by the country of Brandenburg. http://www.christianebergelt.com/
Katalin Kuse was born 1991 in Munich. As an environmental scientist she is working in the field of ecological economy, based on communities and regional cooperatives. She is currently studying Creative Writing (M.A.) at the University Hildesheim, Germany. She writes poetry and prose, works for an online podcast radio and does analogue photography in combination with text. Exhibitions and short-films since 2012. https://litradio.net/author/kuseka/
Gill Partington has a Ph.D from the University of London and an MA from the University of Warwick. Artist statement: My work investigates, from various angles, the meanings of the material page in the digital era. Although primarily an academic and theorist, my research has become increasingly practice–based, involving printmaking and bookwork. I operate at a disciplinary crossing point of literary studies, art and cultural theory, and focus on the artist’s book as part of an investigation into the wider history and ontology of the book, its various forms, its uses and abuses. I approach the ‘artist’s book’ not as a fixed category, therefore, but as a set of questions, and a means to interrogate the conceptual and material parameters of the book.
Lucia Gašparovičová was born 1984 in Žilina, Slovakia, and lives and works in Bratislava. Artist statement: In my artistic work I find it important to get to know a variety of environments. I work with the topic of scale and size and their relationships with observers, users, and also the environment that surrounds them. I am searching for interactions between objects, installation and spectators. I try to set up the description of the borders of interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity from which a new authentic work arises, is essential for me. I work with the theme of material and emotional value of the object. Often I have appropriated elements of daily use, which I rework in precious materials and thereby alter their character, while watching the newly acquired relationship between object and user. https://www.works.io/lucia-gasparovicova
Mari Anniina Mathlin was born 1980 in Pattijoki in Finland. Artist statement: I work with installations, paper reliefs, drawing, assemblages and artist books. When working with artist books I´m interested in exploring the different ways how story, idea or mood can be mediated through the paper and pages of a book. How a single color or a scratch or pattern of crumbled paper can stand for a text or a sentence. Will it still be a book that someone can read? I am interested in how time and the movement of turning pages can be involved into the moment we look artist books and all the possibilities that these concepts can offer to the creative process of artist book making.
Patrick Blenkarn is Vancouver-based artist frequently working in theatre, video, and bookmaking. He has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film history and is an avid language learner. His recent projects have explored themes of multilingualism, critiques of nationalism, and the history of philosophy. He recently finished a graduate degree for which he developed a theatre work about the role of books in this history of standardization and revolutions. http://patrickblenkarn.com/