BOOK ICELAND 2018

BOOK ICELAND _ JUNE 18 – 29,  2018
Application Deadline: February 1, 2018
www.gullkistan.is/book-iceland

BOOK ICELAND; TEXTURES OF LAND

& textures of BOOK

At Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, iceland

Still 2 spaces available.  Apply Now for Feb 1st deadline:

www.gullkistan.is/book-iceland

Gullkistan Center for Creativity and I invite you to take part in this Book Arts seminar in Iceland during the summer of 2018. Participants will explore Iceland's varied landscape; look at how the natural processes have shaped the landscape and explore ways to express those energies through artistic experimentation.  Those experiments will be content for two book structures taught during the workshop - the drumleaf binding and coptic-bound cover book.

The workshop is for artists of all levels interested in exploring the book form and learning about Iceland, its book culture & history, weather, and diverse landscapes.

For specifics, check out:  www.gullkistan.is/book-iceland

A Library or Museum of Water?

The image above is a detail of the floor from American artist, Roni Horn's Library of Water.  "Heidur" is an adjective that describes weather that is bright, clear and cloudless. As a noun it means "honor".

I returned to Roni Horn's Library of Water in the town of Stykkisholmer on the north coast of the Snaefellsness peninsula.  (Refer to my July 31, 2012 entry on first visit).  The former library contains  24 floor-to-ceiling clear glass columns of water collected as ice from some of the major"jokulls" of Iceland,  formed many millennia ago and now are rapidly receding.  I was told that one of the glaciers represented in the installation has melted. Rebecca Solnit in her most recent book, The Faraway Nearby, referred to the library as an homage to the primordial forces of the glaciers.  Is it too soon to rename the library to  "Museum of Water" as an homage to once was?

Nonetheless, it's a striking homage as the glass columns refract and reflect light onto a vulcanised rubber floor embedded with single words in Icelandic and English: ill, cruel, slaemt, bad, stillt, tranquil, svalur, cool, hressandi, bracing, lygnt, still, glettid, frisky, vitlaust, crazy, napur, piercing cold, blautt, wet, heidur, quiet. The isolated words are adjectives that describe weather.  Roni Horn wrote "Weather is a metaphor for the atmosphere of the  world, for the atmosphere of one's life; weather is a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social, and moral energy of a person and a place."