Residency: The Icelandic Textile Centre (Blönduós, Iceland)

In June 2026, I spent a month as a resident artist at the Icelandic Textile Centre in Blönduós, supported by a Concordia University Field School fellowship.

I arrived in the north of Iceland with a clear, structured plan rooted in my background as a scientific illustrator: to observe local mosses and lichens, translating their miniature structures into botanical textile pieces. However, the physical reality of the landscape immediately reoriented my focus. I found myself looking past the flora to the volcanic substrate beneath it—specifically the dark igneous basalt, the rich greys of the beach stones, and the hidden agates formed inside ancient subterranean lava pockets. My inquiry quickly shifted from plant life to a fascination with the weight, texture, and slow time of Icelandic stone.

The Work: Ode to Agate

This body of work explores the material tension between the two-dimensional flatness of illustration and the three-dimensional weight of textile craft.

The process began on the shore, observing and rendering the complex arrangements of beach pebbles using watercolor and gouache on heavy paper. To break the boundaries of the flat paper plane, I used traditional wet-felting techniques to construct independent, dimensional "wool stones". Rather than permanently anchoring these textile objects to the paper, I allowed them to simply rest on top of the watercolor paintings, creating a temporary, mutable dialogue between the painted surface and the physical object.

To explore this interaction on a larger physical scale, I utilized the TextileLab’s digital FeltLoom to create a large tapestry that maps the macro-patterns of the volcanic shoreline, leveraging mechanical entanglement to merge raw wool into a cohesive, structural landscape.