birthday week: indian food + spinning

thursday december 8

food: indian buffet

got take out from a really good indian buffet called karma, right next to where i ate the other day - han dynasty. the buffet was $10 and i loaded as much as i could in my container, had left overs for today. soooo good, very pleased :)

craft: spinning!

after loosing my drop spindle for two years my boyfriend gave me a new bottom whorl drop spindle for my birthday (ain't he the best? :) happily, i spent most of the night spinning skeins of roving that i had lying around for a number of years and glad to get back to them finally. i plan on doing a post of how to spin soon!

such a beautiful dye job. i bought this from a seller on etsy years ago and sadly can't remember them. oh well, isn't it lovely though?! it reminds me of a peacock.

also i wanted to share this really cool website/blog about iceland, it's called every single place in iceland. they do posts on somewhere in iceland each day, whether its a major area or the small lake in reykjavik. amazing photography and cute posts. i have to say, iceland is doing a teriffic job with tourism advertising this year. it goes to show the importance of social media these days... i only wish i knew about this blog before i went! check it out!

(from the blog, which is brand-spanking new... this is tjornin, the small lake in the center of reykjavik. there really are soo many birds there, it's insane but cool)

Horse Encounter

 in iceland there are a lot of horses and a lot of sheep. the one thing i noticed about the wild horses is that they seemed to be a lot more static than i had anticipated and seemed almost fake because they barely moved. these were the closest horses to the road, so we had to capture them... if it wasn't so cold we would have gotten out and moved closer!

Inspiring Iceland

whew! i have made it back home from iceland (sadly, as i wish i didn't want to) and let me just say it was beyond inspiring. iceland had been my #1 on my travel "wish list" for a very long time. this actually means a lot, because i tend to have "travel ADD" and quickly get distracted when i find an amazing destination that i want to add to the top of my list. but no, not with iceland. i had applied for a travel fellowship to go there through my school and being a poor college student, could never find the means to go. luckily, i was able to go now that i graduated from such an institution, and made my way over to the island of fire and ice after several years (and months of more detailed road planning). my boyfriend and i rented a car and drove around the entire country, taking a total of 5 very long, yet very very very visually stimulating - to say the least - days. driving through mountains, under fjords, past waterfalls and over moss-covered lava fields our brains took in every detail and our camera batteries wore out. the last 5 days  we stayed in reykjavik and explored the capital by eating traditional icelandic food, including puffin and whale, spending a day trip to the westman islands and climbing a volcano that was still warm and meeting icelanders who are perhaps the most genuine people i've met so far.

of course i took about 1,900 pictures and tons of video which i will be posting more of. these are some of my favorite/most inspiring ones. i would say that iceland has far surpassed my expectations and both of us want to go back already! such an incredible amazing country...

I'M FINALLY GOING TO ICELAND

so i am finally trekking to iceland, after years of longing i am finally with an actual plan ticket, hotel reservations, and a booked rental car. and it's 3 weeks away! i will be traveling with my boyfriend dan, (who at first thought my i wanted to go to iceland because he thought i was part icelandic) and we will be there from october 21st - 31st...so it will be in the 40s, windy and rainy. but hey! it's the trip of my dreams so nothing can get in my way! i made a map of our road trip (still in editing phase) of our 10 day travels in the land of fire and ice. more details soon to come as we get closer and closer... and don't worry, we'll be taking lots of videos and photos!

above is a photo of kirkjufell, which means "church rock" and yes, we will in fact be waking up to a view of this across the harbor from grundarfjordur where we will be staying one night :)


View Iceland Roadtrip in a larger map

this time last year

work from the Fellowship Exhibition 2010. Icelandic landscape inspired embroidery pieces. Each were hand painted warp, hand woven and hand embroidered. 

this piece was my favorite i think. it says "it calls" in Icelandic. 

i want to be here right now

found this picture on flickr of skogafoss, iceland. new favorite picture of iceland... for right now. soooo amazing.

erupting volcano

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

iceland embroidery

these are recent works that i completed for the juried fellowship exhibition at my school. i proposed to travel to iceland this summer to study the landscape for my work. each image is inspired by specific locations in iceland known for their stunning landscape that i had planned to travel to. i dyed the warped threads, hand wove the fabric and embroidered on the surface. the phrase "pad kallar" means "it calls" in icelandic. i know the images are terrible, so bare with me...the color washed out a lot, i swear they are actually more brilliant than this!

Caution: Hot

I find these pictures if cooling and hot lava particularly beautiful yet gross, but that's really the best kind of beautiful!

artist spotlight: olafur eliasson

ok, so actually i would have to say that olafur eliasson is probably my favorite icelandic artist, well really icelandic-danish. i was instantly drawn to him when i first learned of him a few months ago, his experimentation with light, and his work with phenomenology. eliasson really creates complex optical illusions using simple instruments like water, light, mirrors, dirt, etc. his work is truly an experience and i really hope i get a chance to see his work soon.

Hrafnkell Sigurdsson

Artist Hrafnkell Sigurdsson is represented by i8 Gallery in Reykjavik. His mission as stated by the gallery, "Hrafnkell Sigurdsson’s work examines the transitory elements in man’s relationship with nature and plays with ideas of reversal and ritual. His photographic series include images of empty tents in the snow, houses under construction, garbage bags in the streets, and most recently, portraits of trash."

It is this notion of the transitory elements in the relationship between man and nature that I am interested in. What we do with the earth, what we leave behind, how nature can destroy or take over what we built in the past, and even how these things effect us emotionally are some ideas that I have been trying to unearth in my thoughts and in some of my pieces.

I am working on an exhibition for my Curatorial Methods class and it deals with some of these notions of past and present, architecture vs. nature. Icelandic artists tend to deal with these issues quite often because I believe it is in Iceland where these things are happening, and where the natural landscape has effected culture for a very long time.

How to Speak Icelandic...What a trip

Check out this series of videos that are really good and very scary.

Speaking of a Sensorium...

Artist Finnbogi Petursson deals with the use of technology to help us engage with our senses more visually and on a higher level. For example, many of his works attempt to capture sound in a visually, like his work pictured here entitled Circle, (1991). In Circle Petursson hung a speaker that transmitted sound waves directly above a pool of water and projected the ripples it created on the wall. In his Watertanks Series, the piece Fire-Air is also an attempt to visually reproduce sound through fire which is really mesmerizing.

Petursson's work and many other Icelandic artists, like Olafur Eliasson deal with nature and our senses. I find it very interesting that Petursson and Eliasson share very similar ideas, Eliasson has done a piece similar to Circle but it focuses more on the viewer's movement on rickety walkways that creates the ripples in the water.

Machine Knitted Glaciers

The latest from the machine knitting studio is the stripe project. My stripe concept was based off glaciers and icebergs with striped designs. I used a bamboo and wool blend for the white yarn and Noro silk garden yarns for the other colors. I really enjoyed using the Noro yarns, they are fantastic and soooo beautiful. The image at above is the iceberg I was directly inspired from. I would like to go back a create a larger, blanket-size piece to hang on the wall or do something else with.

The Land of Vikings

For those of you who don't know me, I am infatuated with Iceland and I really hope I get a chance to go there some day. I have always been inspired by nature when it comes to my artwork and Iceland has an almost untouched raw and powerful landscape that is moving. I am interested in the random and sometimes predicted patterns of the natural landscape and our relationship with nature. Icelanders are perfect examples of people who care and are inspired by their environment on a daily basis.

It's the end of the school year...

...and I can't wait for summer. We are all very busy in the Textile department with final projects and everyone certainly has a lot to undertake but they will all look great when they are done.

My final project for weaving is based off glacier lakes from Iceland. It's a tapestry weave with exposed warp so I can't wait to see the end result...it's definitely time consuming though.