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Stitching Stories and The Changing Colours

December 17, 2011 by roamingfeet

In Iceland the colours and my feelings are constantly changing, but this past month or so since I returned from my trip abroad, the sky, the walls, the ground, the tomatoes on the windowsill, indeed my life has changed colour more than usual.

When I first returned it was ‘unusually warm’ (5 degrees C!) and the snow had not yet settled. Now it well and truly has, and the nights seem to be creeping up our front steps and tapping on the back window all at the same time. The daylight hours are almost an immediate transition from sunrise to sunset making for some very striking pink light on the clouds and the mountains. Around the time the nights started coming to visit early, our tomatoes – which had waited small and green for many weeks as if waiting for something to show them what to do next – expanded and reddened, asking to be plucked. How sweet and intense months of care and anticipation tastes! It was a strange thing to see red tomatoes with a snowy white backdrop – Christmassy in a bizarre way – but we very proud to have produced these homegrown wonders in such a place!

And while it has been a time for wrapping up warm (more on that later!) and wrapping up presents, we finally could not resist the temptation to unwrap our little Icelandic house, and see what lay beneath our wall paper. Our fingers had traced ridges that felt like old wooden panel and what started with a curious peek turned into a total wall make over that ended in a unexpected find.

We made our way through several layers of wall paper from various eras…

…finding it all lined with hessian nailed into the wood, and old Icelandic newspapers.

And there on the right, for the keen of sight, is what lined most of the walls in our bedroom: A copy of The Weekly Scotsman from June 19th 1909! And in it were fashion adverts for ladies’ skirts and hats…

…delicious articles that speak so strongly of the time as to conjure up whole stories in the imagination:

“The Mauretania carried recently to New York a consignment of twenty tons of Ostrich feathers valued at more than £100,000.“

And sound advice, in the twentieth century and always:

“Don’t worry children. Don’t worry about them. Guardian Angels still exist, even in the twentieth century.”

All of this wrapped up in our walls and stitched in to the story of our house! We have kept all the best bits to be made into goodness-knows-what, some already made into Christmas cards, but you cannot throw away stories like these.

Our open house and Christmas sale before the house got so full I couldn’t take pictures! The kitchen was full of men clutching mugs of home made hot chocolate and listening to my boyfriend’s father telling tales, while all the women huddled around my jewellery picking out Christmas gifts.

And underneath it all, the wooden panel that we’d dreamed of, but even better. Wooden, unpainted from 1902, matured to a lovely deep honey colour that has transformed the feeling of our house into a cosy wooden cabin in the winterscape. It has made the perfect backdrop to lantern lit evenings doing wintry things, Christmas sales and cocoa tales, and lastly but not leastly…

Our end of year Icelandic Jumper Extravaganza!!! Roll up, roll up! We have decided to put some second hand Icelandic jumpers up for auction on Ebay to raise money for our upcoming marriage. I cannot recommend Icelandic jumpers highly enough. In fact I am wearing one right now. They are 100% pure Icelandic hand knitted wool, which is excellent quality and keeps you at a perfect temperature, both inside and outside. They are a very beautiful and practical thing to have that will keep you toasty for years to come. And very fashionable at the moment so I hear!

A small selection of the delights up for sale over here and here!

If the idea of wrapping one of these around yourself, your loved ones or your children warms your heart, or you’d just like to help us along on our journey, please do pop in and say Hello! and Hi! The auction ends Sunday and Monday nights; all being well just in time to get them to you for Christmas!

It is Icelandic tradition at Christmas to give family members a new item of clothing, lest they get eaten by the Jólakötturin (Yule Cat). This was to encourage folk to work hard to use up the Autumn wool before Christmas, which still happens to this day. You cannot find many women here who do not knit of an evening between the autumn sheep gathering and Christmas, and this is how they were made. Enjoy the stories in each stitch!

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Of Moving Pictures & Wedding Dress Quests

November 7, 2011 by roamingfeet

Sometimes an idea, a dream, floats around in your head and heart for a long time and you know and feel it will happen, but it takes a small gust of autumn wind to come along one day to blow the pieces into place, so that the path is cleared before you and you know the time is *now*.

Going South in Autumn

I was told many months ago that my film Earth To Earth: Natural Burial and The Church of England had been accepted in The 20th International Festival of Ethnological film in Belgrade, Serbia. It has also been in festivals in UK, Italy, Iceland and soon to be in Montreal, but I had never been able to attend. I love film festivals just for the fact that they take you to places you may not otherwise have gone, and take you there with a unique objective that allows you to meet interesting people and get beneath the surface of the place.

Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

At around the same time, my dear man and I decided to marry next year! Excitement abounds and quite a party is in the making. In time my thoughts turned to the dress I would wear. There was a picture I stumbled upon months ago on the web of an 18th century hand embroidered coat – wool on linen – which I had metaphorically clutched in my hand for months. The source described it as ‘French’, but it reminded me of Eastern European folk embroidery. Wherever it was from didn’t really matter. All I knew was that I wanted a dress that had lived some generations and was hand embroidered; imbued with that inimitable earthiness that old handmade objects have. A dress with a story.

And so I asked the organisers of the film festival in Serbia if I might find such a dress if I were to come to Belgrade. “Why don’t you come and we’ll find out?”, was the reply. The prospect was too tempting and so I emptied my pockets and did any odd jobs I could before leaving. As it happened I was headed south anyway (anywhere in the world involves going south from here, unless I was taking a boat to Greenland!) for the annual Reykjavik International Film Festival, where I was participating in the Talent Lab for young directors and competing for the Golden Egg Award. It is a rare opportunity in this land to feast on films from all over the world and Iceland in a discursive setting, and the Talentlab was wall to wall workshops with directors, producers and actors.

It was all quite intense for me actually, coming from my slow paced Arctic Circular lifestyle to a place where you are supposed to ‘network’ relentlessly and people are beavering away on their Macbook Pros editing films whilst participating in a workshop. I sometimes looked around and thought, ” This is not me”, but as my good friend reminded me, there are many ways to be a film maker.

My way is to inhabit a space where I feel there is a story, and to live it for some time making mind sketches, understanding the shapes and patterns in that life or theme. Then the moment comes when something that is both me and something outside of me says “it’s time to begin”, and then the film starts to sort of make itself. It is a largely penniless existence, but one in which I can be fully present, and fully myself. One aspect of the festival totally resonated and shall stay with me: the films and words of the festival’s honoured guest and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, Béla Tarr. If you have not seen his films I urge you to.

“Be yourself; find your style, your way; find the border and cross it, or else you may be lost or, even worse, boring. Don’t forget what you really want to say; there is no recipe. The recipe is you.”

Wise and beautiful words from a very rare kind of being, especially in the film world. He has uncompromisingly followed his vision and has made his last film because he “has said all he wants to say”. He is planning to spend his time now being a producer for talented but shy directors, and founding a film school in Croatia which creates a space with in which creation is favoured over education.

I also had the pleasure of finally meeting Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson (also brilliant) whose short film The Last Farm is one of my favourites. He was premiering in Iceland his first feature film Volcano. It turns out he once tried to buy the house we live in and knows it and our view very well. So that was cosy. I usually find the prospect of meeting Important People rather intimidating, but he was lovely so I invited him to pop in for a cup of tea next time he’s up this way.

And we were invited to the President of Iceland’s house and allowed to snoop around. No bag searches there, and we had to queue so he could shake each of our hands individually. It might sound like a big deal to foreigners but he’s in the phone book, and besides, life’s a bit different over here.

But I digress. When I’m in Reykjavik, because the international airport is there I feel a lot closer to the rest of the world than where we live, which isn’t really close to anywhere. Is just is what it is. So the Reykjavik Film Festival was an ideal stepping stone for this deliciously nose-led adventure to Europe to find my dress. My heartstrings tugged me to make my first stop my best friend up north in England, and then on to London to begin my quest.

My cousin, who’s a costume maker for the BBC among other things, took me to Goldhawk Road in Shepherds Bush (aka fabric shops galore) to look at what fabrics were available were we to make something from scratch. It was quite a marvel and reminded me of souks in Morocco and India, where there are clusters of shops in one area of town selling similar things. In fact, the whole wedding dress mission took me on a journey through many corners of the world…

I started with a couple of flea markets in South London, as you never know where you might pick up an old embroidered panel. No luck with that, but I did buy a most lovely and engaging Wayang golek puppet from a man in a pirate hat, who proceeded to help me with my search (the puppet, not the man). In fact my ‘up-do’ for the wedding may well be inspired by her elegant coiffure.

Then I saw a girl in a tube station with a beautiful cardigan and thought she might just know where I might find the kind of thing I was looking for, and she pointed me to a woman at Portobello Market. The woman was not there, but I got talking to another woman who, on my casually mentioning that I was also looking for a pair of Tibetan felt boots responded, “I’ve got a pair of those…they’ve been sitting in my garage for years!” and arranged to meet me with them another day. Potential footwear – sorted.

The London suzani treasure trove

A suzani merchant in Samarkand, Uzbekistan

I also found an Afghanistani shop, and one that was refreshingly unboutiquified. At the back was pile upon pile of large rectangular hand embroidered wall hangings (suzani) which I worked my way through to see if one might make an interesting dress. The term suzani is derived from the Persian suzan, meaning “needle”,  and variations of these decorative and colourful embroideries are made across Central Asia including in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan where traditionally they have formed the main ornament of a house interior.

The myriad symbolic designs are embroidered onto velvet, silk or cotton, and the piece would form a part of a bride’s dowry. A mother might begin planning the design of the embroidery upon the birth of a daughter, or at least long before her marriageable age. The work is executed by the bride to be to demonstrate her stitching prowess, often helped by experienced female family members and friends  shortly before her marriage. Most often suzani designs comprise symbolic representations of a blossoming garden. In the midst of the rich decorative patterns one can make out talismanic symbols: a pomegranate for fertility, knives for protection from an evil eye, a pepper so that evil spirits will pass you by, a lamp for purification from evil, a bird for luck. Legend has it that all authentic suzanis have an intentional mistake in them, as a reminder of human imperfection.

In the end I didn’t find one suitable for a dress (not to mention I began struggling with the idea of cutting one up) but did buy three with which to decorate our wedding tent. According to the wealth of information at Pomegranate Textiles,  Eastern suzanis, (which I believe the ones I selected are):

“… are much closer to the traditional nomad designs of the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, who in pre-Islamic times worshiped the sun, the moon and the stars. These are bold designs, with an archaic symbolism centered on a circular motif, whose exact meaning is debated by specialists: Does it represent the sun, the moon, the heavens, a flower—or an open pomegranate, a symbol of fertility from the Mediterranean to China? It is clearly a positive image of continuity and survival, and it appears over and over again in the life of the region: It is painted or incised on the walls of houses, stamped onto bread, sewn into other embroideries used for everyday tableware, and even echoed in the brickwork of the domes of mosques and madrasas (religious schools). It often employs powerful contrasts, as if to distinguish dark and light, good and evil, life and death, and strong colors such as red for blood, brown for the earth and blue-black for the sky.”

A fine backdrop to a celebration of your commitment to each other then.

Sun, moon, heavens or open pomegranate?

I was rather touched by the shop keeper’s patience (letting me stay some time after closing) and enthusiasm to share some details of Afghanistani wedding customs with me, inlcuding pictures from his own brother’s wedding on his iphone. Apparently the groom wears the dowry suzani on his shoulder during the wedding.

I was eager to return also to the wonderful Rau Antiques in Islington, where I had bought a very special dress some years ago. The owner, Pip Rau, is a delightfully eccentric lady who travelled extensively in Central Asia in the 1970s and was taken by the incredible handwork in the embroidered textiles and Ikats she found there. She had a natural eye for the best pieces and started collecting, and is now one of the foremost collectors of Afghan and Central Asian textiles and jewellery in the UK, if not the world. Her collection of Ikats was shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2008, and she has authored and contributed to several books on the subject.

In her shop, I didn’t find a dress but I did find an antique hand embroidered Tajik headdress which I’ll give you a peek of below. The shop is almost bursting with beautiful textiles, but fortunately for me she said, “I’ve got much more at home, you know”. And so I spent an enjoyable morning at her jaw-droppingly beautiful house (which is also a labour of love and many years), my eyes flitting all around at the wonders she has collected and salvaged, including an old hand carved wooden Nuristani house inlaid with glittering mica, which inhabits her back garden.

I picked through the dresses and tried on my favourites. After not very long there was one that made us both say “Aha!”. It is as if it was tailor made for me, in autumnal colours that I love – deep reds, oranges and even pale duck egg blue, and a skirt with a trim of almost every colour embroidered onto a black cotton ground. The colour may be slightly unconventional for a wedding, but my influences are many, and as it will be an outdoor wedding in the wilds of Iceland, anything light coloured would just get dirty in seconds.

It is actually a dress Pip got at an auction rather than one of her travels to Central Asia, so we are unsure of the provenance. There is another adventure to be had in finding that out. I wish I could put a call out to my readers for ideas but alas, for the moment, as the dress must remain concealed from my man it must remain concealed from everyone! But if anyone does have any ideas as to the origins of this dress just from the embroidery and rik rak trim, please do send me your thoughts! (N.B. the colourful embroidered flowers are a separate head dress with a different provenance).  I was surprised, excited and also secretly slightly disappointed to have found something even before going to Serbia, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from continuing a ‘search’ of kinds, as I was enjoying the ride too much!

A tiny detail from the head dress and skirt

And so on I went to Serbia, where the folks at the Ethnographic Museum (the site of the film festival and also home to a fine collection of traditional dress from the Balkans) had been busy doing research for me, bless their hearts!

From the collection:

Peacock feathers in a marriage headdress are said to ward off the evil eye, and the coins constitute part of the dowry as well as being for decorative purposes.

A black felt hand embroidered zubun

After looking at their collection I was allocated two anthropology students to take me on an adventure into the hills around Belgrade to find the man, Kiri, who makes replicas of all the museum’s pieces.

We got a little lost…

…but eventually we found it tucked down a lane.

After a good rummage through their beautiful collection of embroidered felt Zubun (sleeveless jackets of various lengths) I settled on one that I thought Orri might like to wear. If he doesn’t end up wearing it, it’s still a beautiful piece and anything made of wool will be well used by us. It is completely handmade (the felt and the embroidery) and it’s a replica of a piece from Bosnia. Here’s a little detail of it:

The museum’s ‘little black book’ of grannies was searched for people who had been in previously trying to sell traditional clothing but the museum had not needed them. One lady came in with a lovely zubun and embroidered apron (and an old black and white picture of her mother wearing it) and as tempting as it was, it wasn’t quite ‘it’ enough to warrant changing my whole outfit.

A national newspaper, Blic, got wind of my story and came to interview me about my search, and what a wedding might look like for someone who is English, grew up in Kenya, and now lives in Iceland! I was also interviewed about my background, my film and the film festival by the national TV broadcaster for a culture programme, in amongst the traditional dress collection in the Ethnographic museum.


I was amused that the newspaper at least was more interested in the wedding dress story than my role in the film festival! But I suppose that is what drew me on the adventure in the first place: I had no idea what would come out of it, but whatever did would make a good story. And that is what life is: a story that we write for ourselves; a dress that we wear and adapt to our needs. So it better be a colourful one!

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The picturebook of autumn

September 25, 2011 by roamingfeet

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I went out for a walk…

August 21, 2011 by roamingfeet

I went out for a walk this Summer and found in it so many places and so many things: I found my garden and its unfolding. Small islands across the sea that all winter had lain unknown to me. I found England again and train journeys across new terrain. And Spain: friends and endless roaming through labyrinthine streets and flea markets. I found Kenya: a journey of the heart and feet. The midnight sun, many moons (one eclipsed), snow, rain, birth, death, marriage, reunion, equators, arctic circles, seas, deserts, journeying far and being still. Summer. Such a simple name for so many things, and yet, it is that simple. At any given moment across the earth manifold stories are telling themselves, and mine is but one. It has been a particularly eventful year for the earth as a whole, too, and I am feeling it. Feeling something shifting. It is time to empty the contents of my pockets onto the table and see what my walk yielded.

A summer in Iceland feels like you are living a whole year in three months. The rush of adrenaline and motivation that comes with having hours of daylight sees you sometimes living your days in your nights and your nights in your days, and sometimes the gossamer thread that holds them together and apart unravels. Sleep when you’re tired and eat when you’re hungry: that’s the only guideline.

11pm Early August

It is a season of limitless possibility and activity, and the plants, birds and animals all feel it too.

Surprisingly, my sleep has been just as deep as in winter, but with a tiredness borne of the fullness of my days rather than wool-lined lethargy.

My light-emotions were rather confused by a hop, skip and jump to Kenya in late May. Here in Iceland it had finally begun to feel like summer was in sight, after all these months of waiting. And despite my much brighter destination, I felt like I was missing the very thing I had so anticipated. But a grandmother’s 90th birthday and good friends’ weddings and birth-givings should not be missed, so off I went.

Tragically my grandmother’s birthday celebrations became her funeral, and as prepared as you may think you are for a dear one’s death, the act itself and everything that comes with it takes many moons to process. I found that my experience of working with death and grief in my last film, helped me enormously.

Thankfully, inspiration and support can tumble into your path when you really need it. I came across a post on this fascinating blog written by Daniela Othieno, who, following the death of her mother, has come to perceive life as The Great Compost Heap. She is, as I have been, greatly inspired by David Abram’s book The Spell of The Sensuous. It is a clarion call for us to actively engage with the more-than-human world that we live in, and are part of, and not to view nature as something separate from ourselves. I have never been so physically affected by my surroundings as here in Iceland, and it is a dance that I must continually improvise. There is so little development here that your experience of nature is direct; immediate. It is awe-inspiring but can also be brutal, as you are tossed around in its changeable winds. A passage from the book echoes this sentiment beautifully:

My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined; when I wake up one morning to find that a week-long illness has subsided and that my strength has returned, the world, when I step outside, fairly crackles with energy and activity: swallows are swooping by in vivid flight; waves of heat rise from the newly paved road smelling strongly of tar; the old red barn across the field juts into the sky at an intense angle. Likewise, when a haze descends upon the valley in which I dwell, it descends upon my awareness as well, muddling my thoughts, making my muscles yearn for sleep. The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn.
p. 33

It is a precious handbook for a fuller experience of our lives, which I have delved into and come out of so many times, as each chapter, each paragraph is a reawakening of a sense you always knew but didn’t realise you had forgotten. It compels you to lay down the book and go and walk in life with this fresh reimagining of place and our place in it.

Iceland

Kenya

England

I have been inspired lately also by the doings of the Dark Mountain folk, who have just published their second book (of which David Abrams is a contributor) of stories, essays, poems, images, conversations and recipes all urging us to stop pretending. These times may be confusing; frightening even. But we can still find and create beauty and hope when we look it plainly in the face. We humans have proved ourselves to be excellent adaptors but we must adapt to an honest vision of what our reality is. The book, so I hear, is a kind of inspiration-toolbox filled with reflections on how we might live in, and through, these times. I await the arrival of my copy in the hands of some visitors like I look forward to my man coming back from the sea. I look forward to sitting in bed with both of them.

There was also a Dark Mountain festival a couple of weekends ago where interesting and interested folk gathered to discuss, play and dance with ideas for a possible future. What makes it unique is that it is a stimulating environment within which it is alright to be confused and challenged. A space is created to ask questions without the agenda necessarily being to find answers. Reading some reports, it seemed to be an indescribable experience where many went through a kind of limen and will be putting the pieces of themselves back together for months to come. We all need to do that. It is the way of nature, which is also us: cycles. I only wish I had not been so many miles away from it!

The first thing that resonates with me about their philosophy is the notion of acceptance of death and decay (of individuals, systems, economies) and moving on in that reality rather than one of denial. It is an obvious and simple thing which is overlooked by the majority, and one of the fundamental reasons why I left London just over two years ago to dive into an uncertain, but honest, life on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Of course, London has its magic and there are many very interesting things going on there that can only emerge from the melting pot of ideas and backgrounds that a nexus like London accommodates. But on a quotidian level, I felt the immediately visible layer of society was careering around (pun not intended but apt all the same) arranging their priorities to a very different list than mine, because they are trying to create a security that doesn’t exist. I also found the lack of time distinctly uncomfortable, and the knock-on effect that has on one’s attentiveness, pace, abilities and resourcefulness.

I am reminded of this everywhere. This I found written in a puppet museum on my way south at the beginning of Summer.

I never thought it would be easy in Iceland, and I am by no means saying it holds all the answers.  Everything remains an experiment here, but I am certainly more aware of myself and my relationship to nature. It is an experience that sees me ride the highs and lows of my possibilities, all the time knowing that however it feels in the moment it is an invaluable layer to my skin. I shall leave for another post my reflections on where I feel I am and how this experience has shaped me. At the moment I am still processing it, and phases of that processing seem to align with the shifting seasons: as Summer turns to Autumn I am still ‘outside’ and beginning to turn in.

Beans in progress and our shiny new roof.

This year (while I was away thankfully) it snowed in June so it was hardly a ‘typical’ set of conditions for our outdoor doings, on garden and house. Poor Orri was left with a roofless house in the snow after he had removed the old corrugated iron to replace it, thinking June was safe. We pressed ahead with our vegetable growing experiments nonetheless to see what would happen. The green sea of indoor propagated seedlings become a rather less numerous variety of earth dwelling beings: from straggly otherworldly spinach (the likes of which I have never seen) to butternut squash plants that flowered happily indoors then resented leaving the warmth of our bathroom windowsill, to beans that nearly died but had a second try at life and now wonder whether it is worth climbing the pole any further now that they can feel Autumn in the wind. But there is still hope for potatoes, carrots and brocolli. We were not scientific in our approach, and knew that much of it would die, but adopted the characteristically Icelandic approach of “bara prófa” (just try).

The vegetable adventures have been joined by feathered ones: we have acquired four ‘rescue hens’. They were unwanted by a previous owner as  their egg laying was halted by their distress following a dog attack. It has been a wonder to see them grow calmer, day by day, and start to lay. Yesterday I got four eggs which is a miracle from these girls!

Adopting an entwined birch and a pine who were meant to be together, and remain so.

Another corner of our garden has had some trees walk into it, thanks to another twist of fate. Large trees take many years to grow in these climes, and due to a classic Icelandic omission of long term planning, a one time reforestation programme is to become an avalanche guard zone resulting in all the trees needing to be dug up and re-homed. I feel much happier having some shelter against the northwest wind, and the possibility to listen to the sound of wind on leaves.

I have been working as a guide for French- and  English-speaking visitors to this corner of the world. I rather like the Icelandic term for this role, leiðsögumaður, which literally means ‘way-storyteller’. At first I felt that I didn’t know enough ‘facts’ about the region to tell others about it, as life is not lived through facts but through experience. So I talked about my experience and they all seemed to find that much more interesting. Doing this reminded me of how story telling cuts across boundaries. A group of initially stiff retirees would be warmed by tales of my coming here and the love I found, and genuinely wish me well on my adventure as they left the bus, pressing some coins into my hand as if to be part of it and telling me I should write a book.

With the tourists in town almost doubling the population and the locals being in a summer head space, there are a lot more festivities and goings on and opportunities to sell our wares. I had made a new selection of jewellery inspired by Iceland to go alongside my more equatorial curiosities, and Orri had been busy whittling some weird and wonderful sculptures from wood, stone and cement.

And of course, with the many hours of sun to shine on our faces, we have been outside a lot living the summer life. With the head fog of winter cleared firmly away, thoughts and ideas flow like the snow-melt rivers.

I went out for a walk…to a tucked away lighthouse where no road goes, where artists had created an exhibition.

I saw cloud shadowed valleys gouged out by glaciers….

and otherworldly roots that crept off the pages of a fairytale…

and what happens in nature when no humans or sheep live there…

I went out for a walk…along a road that an isolated farmer, tired of being cut off from the world, dug by himself out of the rocky cliffs.

Later, it seems, he left to join the rest of the world anyway…

…but, as if to remain rooted in that place, he left his shoes behind him.

And now, we (and most of the community it seems) are going for a walk to pick bilberries, for this is the season. Our raven has just returned from his summer’s wayfaring. He is dancing on the fence asking why we haven’t left him any food on his rock, and meanwhile trying to pick apart the compost bin with his beak. Autumn has come. Where did your walks bring you to this summer?

I went out for a walk and stayed out til sundown, for going out I found I was really going in.  – John Muir -

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The Things Spring Brings

April 20, 2011 by roamingfeet

Living as we do, teetering on the edge of the Arctic Circle, it has struck me in this liminal phase of Winter-Spring how every few days there is a different rhythm to adjust to. It seems only days ago I was wading through the treacle-gloom of January, knowing it would end some day but not being able to imagine what that might look like. Now the low yellow sun wakes me at 6am and at 10pm it’s still not dark. Suddenly the darkness has become something to be cherished, as daylight nibbles at its edges.

Six o’clock in the morning sun, reincarnating the window sill into a shadow puppet theatre.

There are many confusing aspects about ‘Spring’ in Iceland for an English woman. For me Spring has always been a time of buds bursting forth, eggs hatching, the greening. Here, we are a few days away from an unusually late Easter and there is still a thick layer of snow on the ground. It has teased us many times by melting – the last time almost completely – but no sooner do the green shoots dare to emerge from the sodden flattened yellow grasses of last year, it snows again.

And yet as the sun streams in our windows, reflected in manifold journeys by the snow’s sparkling crystals, it feels hot. Some days we have to open the windows! The long hours of daylight have brought with them a buzz of activity and creativity, and most happily, my man back from the sea.

The shore where he came in

A few of the fish he brought with him…our freezer is full to the brimming!

…and some sea snails that came with them.

As friends started talking about allotments and bluebells in England, and apparent rustlings of vegetable growing started here, our thoughts turned to the exciting prospect of having a vegetable garden. This is the first time I’ve had a garden big enough to dream those dreams, and it is all the more delicious a prospect here as the quality of vegetables available in the shop is often terrible.


We actually have a quite enormous (by our standards) bit of land that we can make use of out behind the house. It is not ours: it is earmarked for future house building which, thanks to the recession, will not happen any time soon. In the meantime it is a sort of every man’s land – children play there, our old neighbour mends things there, and hopefully with our growing efforts we can encourage the village to use it as a community garden.

Almost as if my imaginings were allowed to fill the space we can potentially use, my seed planting was perhaps a little overenthusiastic. I am not an experienced gardener, and I didn’t expect almost ALL the seeds to germinate! Now most of our horizontal surfaces are taken up with propagation operations and Orri has even had to build shelves in the window. It feels like we’re starting a small farm! Ironically, the growing experience I do have is from volunteering at farms or small holdings such as The Lammas Project in Wales and The Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Centre in USA, so perhaps I could not visualise a small scale operation! Still, growing anything here is always going to be an experiment, and so the more seedlings we have the better. It is so exciting looking at them each morning to see how they are coming on. I can only imagine how much more significant a meal is when you know you have grown it yourself.

Perhaps a little late in the day, we realised that a compost bin would be a good thing. It is too late to have any compost for this year, but somehow last Autumn when we arrived, the many inches of snow did not make it the first thing to spring to mind! And so we set to making one from reclaimed bits of wood and I decided a Spring painting was in order – if not to reflect my current environs, at least what they shall be soon. And of course the ever present raven had to make an appearance. Icelandic wild flowers and plants featured (left to right are) Hrafnaklukka (literally The Raven’s Clock/ English = Lady Smock), Melasól (Arctic poppy), Geldingahnappur (literally Eunuch’s Button/ English = Sea Pink), Fífill (Dandelion), and Hvönn (Angelica).

The impulse to create has been infectious and I have been busy working on some films, photography and jewellery-making. I am currently putting the final touches to a film to accompany a live gig recording by my dear friend Orla Wren, and our delicious little bundle is intended for release in unique handmade fashion by the talented Dan and Jess of the beautiful FACTURE label. Here’s a sneak peek…

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And some unexpected visitors to our small town were a story that had to be told, so a fellow film maker and I duly took up our cameras. Mohammed and Nael are two Red Crescent volunteers from Palestine, and happen also to have trained as professional clowns. Through their clownery they bring laughter to children in Palestine, who otherwise are lacking in many of the freedoms other children take for granted. In other countries, they are able to use their clown personas to make children laugh and make them aware at least that Palestine does exist, despite being erased from world maps. Travelling around the region with these two was a unique way to see it.  Their generosity of spirit was inspiring and I hope to make a short film that does their story justice.

Orri has also been busy working his magic in wood. These characters all look as if they have so many stories inside them, as indeed the wood does. Orri’s working method is to sometimes have an idea in mind, but to let the wood tell him what the final result will be. I am always amazed at how full of personality his pieces are – often of the peripheral kind.

After a long slow winter, our remote hometown will soon become abuzz with tourists and Icelanders coming home for the summer and we hope to take the opportunity to sell our wares. We shall in the future have an online shop, but until then if you see anything you like here (my photography or Orri’s sculptures), please do get in touch via this blog.

In the meantime, there is a big trip coming up for me that involves equatorial adventure, weddings, births and 90th birthday parties which I shall tell of as it unfolds. And so it is back to the Spring business and a happy Easter and Springtime to all of you!

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Raven Tales

March 13, 2011 by roamingfeet

I have been learning about the history of our house, and the woman who lived here for seventy years before we did: Bogga was her name. She was a pillar of the village community and many seem to recall her with a smile. We now have a delicious little pile of copies of surveys from the turn of the C20th, images of the village through the years and obituaries of Bogga and her husband. The archivist at the library even has an interview with her recorded on tape: there are not many who can recall how Christmas has changed over seventy years in a remote Icelandic village, but it’s there on that tiny casette. I am both excited and a little nervous to hear it. I imagine it could feel like communing with the spirit world!

Outside the window of my studio, there is a rock that always seems to poke slightly above the snow. The first day I sat by that window, I saw an old man with a flat cap come and put food on that rock. Soon enough a raven swooped down to pick at it. This man turned out to be Bogga’s son-in-law and is our neighbour. We have him to thank for looking after the house so well in the intervening years since Bogga’s death. It seems in those intervening years that he took on the roles that Bogga used to have before she became too old. Apparently there was a raven that Bogga used to feed. If she forgot, he would come and tap his beak on the roof. They were so familiar that sometimes he would come and perch on her. I like to think it is the same raven that comes…we sometimes hear a knocking on the roof…and now he (or they as might be the case…my raven differentiation is not very keen!) is spoilt for choice with tidbits, with Orri’s spoils from the fishing boat.

A deep black smudge of raven often circles the house and settles on lamp posts plok plok-ing with the hollow of his beak.

And down below the blackest of silhouettes struts across the blue white snow to see what he can find.

One day I found this beautiful collection of shapes left in the snow…the trace of a raven stopped to rest his wing awhile…

As the dark ravens slowly circumnavigate their territories, the snow bunting flit in undulating flocks – from roof to ground and ground to roof – collectively hailing their excited cheeps.

And that is the dance of the Not-Quite-Spring: the dark, ominous and solitary playing in the thermals with the sociable and light-hearted.

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In the Light of Darkness

February 19, 2011 by roamingfeet

Wading sleepily through the thick grey-blue half-light of Icelandic winter, one can begin to believe that it is here to stay, and has left an irrevocable mark on the psyche. Some claim to be unaffected, while those who are may not have much to say. I am one of the latter and to lose my sense of motivation, to forget what my ideas were, or worse still convince myself I did not have any, was a struggle indeed. But somehow I knew that feeling would come to an end, and there was little to do but wait patiently for that moment. It is like a tree whose sap is frozen, suspended in its potential. Without the feeling of liquid coarsing through its fibres it could believe itself an empty vessel. But it waits solidly, patiently for The Shift.

The dark nights do have their own wonder (though the dark-light days less so!) and lend themselves to curling up with films and books. We have a lovely cinema in town but unfortunately its programme is rather lacking in appeal. And so we decided to make our own at home. A while ago on our wanders last year, we heard rumours that a projector could be rustled up with little more than a cardboard box, a fresnel lens (the plastic sheet lens that your grandma uses to read with) and an upside down television. And true to form our local skips came up with the goods…a colour TV not only in working order, but the perfect size for the lens we bought. Total cost of cinema creation:£3.49 (for fresnel lens)!

A couple of friends and bowls of popcorn later, we were ready for the screening of our first ‘cardboard’ film…the excellent “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” – one of the first (1926) feature length stop motion animations, by Lotte Reiniger. This is both a film I urge you to watch, and a toy I urge you to create…it is so easy, and seeing a film flickering large on your living room wall is so much more of an experience than huddling around a laptop. Here are some easy-to-follow instructions if the thought of it tickles you.

The cardboard box projector…a bit of a flimsy prototype at this stage!

And here it is…the film on the wall!…

The film features silhouette animated characters, in a technique similar to Javanese shadow puppet shows, and the simplicity of the darks and lights was perfectly suited to our lo-fi technology.

And on the subject of shadows…what a delight it is to see your own when you had forgotten that you ‘normally’ had one! One day I woke to sense a different kind of light peering through the crack in the curtains. Upon throwing them open, I spied a tongue of sun licking the shore below us, where our house has sat in the shaded valley waiting patiently for it to extend its generosity.

And since that day the sun has been creeping closer towards our house, both from in front and behind us: arms of light approaching as if in a cautious embrace. Finally it has arrived, and tomorrow it might even come in through the window! And I am full to brimming…with joy, with ideas, with motivation. The sap is thawing and the flow has begun again.

The moon is full too. She has worked tirelessly for several cycles to cast some compensatory light upon us, and yesterday, as if feeling slightly put out by the sun’s dramatic return, rose large and yellow and lit the valley so brightly I had to go a-night walking.

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Earth to Earth

January 24, 2011 by roamingfeet

Still from my film “Earth to Earth: Natural Burial and the Church of England”

My latest documentary, Earth to Earth : Natural Burial and The Church of  England, the making of which I wrote about here, is finished and away in the post to its commissioner! It is always deeply satisfying to finish a film and to be happy with it, but also a great relief to have it taken out of your hands, as to a film maker, a film is never finished. I do tend to experience a slight sense of loss at the same time, as I have lived and breathed it for many months, been buried in its micro seconds and know off by heart the timbre of every sound clip. But now is the time for getting it out into the world so that people can know about this very beautiful, practical and positive alternative to church and municipal burial and cremation. After all, one fundamental point that we all share is that we shall all, at some point, face our deaths. I hope that this film will go some way to dissolving the taboo surrounding death and lead to people being making heartfelt and informed choices about their resting places rather than simply following ‘tradition’.  Watch this space for details of screenings at film festivals!

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Need teaches a naked woman to spin yarn

January 24, 2011 by roamingfeet

“Neyðin kennir naktri konu að spinna”.  So the Icelandic saying goes.

With the bustle of Christmas and the explosions in the sky that illuminated the changing of the year now all but disappeared, my thoughts and energies are turned towards discovering how a non-indigenous settler here goes about sustaining momentum through the winter months.

Þorri is upon us: a midwinter month from late January to late February according to the Old Icelandic Calendar, the name of which is believed to be the personification of frost. Days are extremely short, and have felt so since the Winter Solstice. Even though they are supposed to get longer from that point on, it has not felt like it, for here we are nestled deep within a steep sided valley. For a few weeks now that so cherished uplifting kiss of pink has not even graced the mountain top as it used to at just-after-lunch. Until today. And I tell you it made me gasp!

The darker-lighter

We have had regular snowfall and many days of its bright blanket settling in for a while. This makes a huge transformation to the landscape, as any light that exists – day or night -  is thrown around for all to share. Sometimes the mountains out across the sea seem to emit the light, and sometimes (and I still cannot fathom this ) as the day gets darker it gets brighter. But sometimes there are just incessant snowstorms and winds and the desire to venture even into the garden vanishes!

A Þorrablót

A feast to break the long winter days – Þorrablót – has begun, with gatherings happening over the next couple of weeks in people’s homes, at village halls and hotels. These gatherings involve eating a selection of Icelandic ‘delicacies’ such as sviðasulta (svið = singed boiled sheep’s head, sulta = jam), hangikjöt (smoked lamb) and súrsaðir hrútspungar (pickled ram’s testicles), and music and dancing. We went to a feast this weekend where the Ásatrúarfélag (‘ the company of Norse pagans’) priestess conducted a ceremony, passing a carved cow horn round in a circle from which each guest drank and hailed Þorri and/or whosoever they wished to hail!

Hangikjöt (literally ‘hung meat’) hanging in a smoke house

Back in December, the Winter Solstice was a special occasion also celebrated with members of the Ásatrúarfélag and participating in a ceremony, or blót. As Christmas is considered a time for winding down and turning in, and receiving guests and visiting others, the ceremony reflected on what being being a good host and a good guest really meant, and together with the priestess we chanted passages from the Hávamál. The purpose of the Ásatrúarfélag, though pagan in its inspiration, is to gather those with a belief to live in harmony with nature and the seasons, so that they can acknowledge and celebrate it together.

The duration of Advent saw all houses, buildings, boats and…tractors (!) bedecked with Christmas lights, turning the town- and village-scapes into Las Vegas abstracts. The dead did not miss out on the fun either…all cemeteries became alight with multi-coloured crosses! Christmas lights are serious business here. When we were trying to find a way to plug in the lights that coiled up our front steps, we realised the previous owner of our house had made a hole in her window frame specifically for this purpose, that was plugged for the rest of the year!

A week before Christmas we made a day trip to a small pine forest a few fjords away to gather Christmas trees for the family. Though it seems strange to chop down some of the very few trees in this country, they were planted intentionally close together to shelter each other and need occasional thinning. And so the deal was struck with the farmer and it has become a yearly tradition. It was almost like a pilgrimage and to travel so far for our tree made the occasion all the more special. It marked the start of the Christmas feeling. For Christmas my parents came from Kenya and my brother from England and squeezed into our little house and sat in hotpots in the snow and ate foods and experienced life a way they had never done before and may never do again! Coming to northern Iceland from Kenya must be akin to interplanetary travel and there’s not many that make it here in winter, let alone equatorial beings.

In the run up to New Year’s Eve, our village hall became a firework supermarket – trolleys and all! The proceeds made from fireworks in Iceland go directly to the mountain rescue service, which is a volunteer-led organisation, and so, in charitable spirit Icelanders stock-pile fireworks and set them off with reckless abandon. Some are named after characters from Icelandic sagas. I remember two years ago, in the midst of ‘the crisis’ I saw some repackaged to be called The Bankers – ideal for those wanting to metaphorically vent their frustration at the collapse of the economy.

The New Year’s celebrations involve all towns and villages first having an impossibly large bonfire stacked high with pallets and other burnable fishing community detritus. Ours was the size of a house, and (a popular trick in these parts) made more exciting by having buckets of petrol thrown on it (!). Then the official fireworks were let off, and in our valley they were as delicious to listen to as to see, as each crackle echoed between the  valley walls tenfold.

At midnight the anarchy began. Outside nearly every house and building, people brought their stash of charity-fireworks and lit them simultaneously.  They were in front of you, behind you, above you and either side, careering in all directions! It was a far cry from the roped-off affairs I have become used to in Britain. The ships in the harbour sounded their horns and torch bearers climbed the mountainside to light a figure of 2011.

And as it all fizzed and flickered to darkness again we looked up to see a black mountain silhouetted by a bright green sky. The aurora borealis had come to join in. According to folklore, the Northern Lights are elves dancing in the sky and you will never see them on New Year´s Eve because on that day the elves move house and come down to the ground to do so. They had obviously got settled in to their new house quickly this year as they were dancing again by a quarter past midnight. We bundled into the car and drove off to a disused road near our house that has no light pollution, and of course it was far more spectacular than any number of fireworks could be.

Our village with yonder mountains glowing blue

With celebrations over and visitors departed, this is perhaps the hardest time of year. There is not the feeling of Spring being around the corner, rather a knowledge that this freezing and melting cycle that is winter will continue for several more months and all there is to do is hunker down and get on with it. I have been impressed at how my neighbours in this village seem to use the cycle/walking paths in all weathers and sometimes you catch somebody walking backwards, their backs braced against the strong winds. I try to get out into the daylight hours whenever the weather is a little more still, to stretch my creaking limbs.

The gradual transformation of our house continues slowly – not aided much by the fact that the town’s only paint mixing machine has been broken for a week with no signs of recovery just yet! It is a strange season this Icelandic winter, as of course now is the time to be indoors and getting on with creative projects,  yet I find the dearth of  light cumulatively demotivating. For me, winter has always felt like a time when the year is holding its breath. The first phase is spent nesting and feeding, and sitting on creative ideas to see which feel good. And then begins the waiting. Waiting for a warmer breeze to come and blow the stillness away. Waiting for ideas to push up into the light and germinate. But of course here, you cannot just wait. It cannot be a breath holding exercise. I must learn to ‘be’ differently here for this part of the year that is much longer than the others.

But of course this adaptation cannot, will not, happen overnight. My mind and body seems to have gone into ‘sleep’ mode, where I can function when necessary but I must set myself goals and write them down lest I forget and wake up in a month’s time! My man Orri has gone to sea and so now I find myself the ultimate Icelandic cliché – the fisherman’s woman! To my surprise, for a few days at a time at least, I do not mind his absence, as I am forced to look at who I am here, and what I need to do to become part of this place, and to make it my own. And in this quite extreme environment, it acts like a magnifying glass, and lets me inspect the image so that in it I can find my own rhythm.

And sometimes, I forget about rhythm and I am taken by a moment where I see something I have never seen before because the right ingredients have come together at the right time to make something truly beautiful. Like ice forming suddenly  in a bay where the sea meets a river’s flow, in shapes I never could have dreamed existed. And that feeds me for days.

Need teaches a naked woman to spin yarn. I get it now.

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Layering and Feathering

December 18, 2010 by roamingfeet

A strange, full, kaleidoscopic autumn has definitively become winter. Strange it was because I felt I experienced several layers of autumn, as work, dear friends and This Journey Called Life took me to different parts of the globe and it’s varied russets and bright bright yellows.

I felt the last rays of sun on the streets of Moscow, in all its hotch-potch of wealth, poverty, industry, glamour and religious devotion. I was invited there to give a presentation on memory making and intangible heritage, illustrated by my 2006 film After The Rains Came: Seven short stories about objects and lifeworlds which I have spoken of before here. Fortunately there was plenty of opportunity to just walk – one of my favourite things to do in new places; stumbling upon Mass in an Orthodox church, being engulfed in its exquisite cacophany of bells, walking over a bridge where a girl welcomed the autumn with a hand crafted head dress, and finding a small supermarket devoted entirely to honey!

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Then to New Mexico to be ring bearer at a most beautiful wedding between friends Alyssa and Zac who do great work over here. They hit upon an excellent idea to hold the ceremony at a natural hot spring, so it became a relaxed and thrapeutic three day gathering of friends. The road to the wedding was bedecked by luminaria and a touching excerpt from a poem by Sufi poet Hafiz:

I saw two birds on a limb this morning

Laughing with the sun

They remind me of how

We will one day exist


Having travelled so far, we opted to stay on and travel in the region for a while. As part of our research into permaculture and sustainable housing that has taken us wwoofing in Spain and Wales this year, we stopped by to have a look at Mike Reynold’s earthship community in Taos. The earthships are indeed a sight to behold, and incorporate waste – the retaining walls are made of used car tyres containing rammed earth, and non structural walls are made with cob, aluminium cans and glass bottles.

However the earth ramming process is extremely labour intensive and involves manually pounding earth into the centre of the tyres until it is rock hard, thus creating a thermal mass. However, with the most expert rammer only able to complete 10 tyres a day, one can only imagine how long (and how much physical stamina) it would take to build a whole house.

The entire region around Taos and Santa Fe seems to comprise adobe structures: from the 18th century San Jose de Gracia church at Las Trampas (the best preserved Spanish colonial church in the US) to more contemporary structures such as multistorey car parks!!! I do love the absence of sharp corners in these buildings and the feeling that they were moulded by hands and whims more than plans and machines. We were extremely blessed to find a kind family on Craigslist who were offering to swap their adobe house in Taos for a house ‘in an exotic location’. With a move to our new Icelandic house imminent, I responded “Is Iceland the kind of exotic you were looking for?”. And indeed it was.

It always astounds me how willing some people are to open their doors to strangers, but somehow when the trust and the sentiment for non monetary exchange is mutually important, it works. So now we have spent a wonderful few days with a free base in Taos and next year the owner and his family will come and stay in our Little Icelandic House, which has become our nest and our creative haven of late.

We have been working like demons to get it to a state where I feel ‘at home’. Though the (especially in winter) essentials such as heat, light and running water were all in good order, it is so important to me to put my mark on it, and fill it with the things which hold my stories. I find it nearly impossible to begin new projects or venture out there until my home is some sort of extension of me, wherever it may be.

By Icelandic standards it is an old (1903) house that we are slowly getting to know, and have the luxury of time to see her in her different lights and different seasons, and in the meantime can put a lick of paint here and pull back some wallpaper over there. Some fine ancient wallpaper lurks beneath the rather less appealing grey-white gloss paint that at one time must have been fashionable here! And behind that, we hope, is wooden panel throughout. Wood is one of the best materials to be surrounded by, but in a country so lacking in its own, it is all the more precious.

The bathroom is the room that has undergone the greatest transformation, as the previous owner – a lady called Bogga who had lived here for 70 years – had only used it for occasional showers and to do her laundry. Old people especially like to use the local swimming pools (which all have hot tubs and showers as a matter of course) as a social centre and so the need for a bathroom of anything more than a practical nature was lessened. We too seem to go to the pools often but it was great fun to have a room which was practically a blank canvass, and it will evolve as time passes.

Half finished pots of paint were acquired from family and friends, a toilet and a bath from Orri’s parents (who miraculously seem to have such things lying around in their garage!), a wicker firewood trunk from the skips and an electric heater from Orri’s grandmother. There is also a delightful old multi-fuel burner in the bathroom which heats the water for the central heating, and so far we have heated the house almost entirely with offcuts from Orri’s father’s joinery workshop and the cardboard boxes and newspaper from the delivery of all my worldly goods that came over the ocean a month or two ago.

The house was also warmed (literally I noticed!) by the arrival of some dear friends recently who came to celebrate our both turning 30. We took them on a breathtaking journey around the fjords to a farm two hours from here where the old lady farmer cooks magnificent food all grown, reared, fished or gathered by her or her family, and a hot spring runs through the land. We went there back in Easter and knew that it would be the perfect place for a gathering. And so, after a delicious meal we all descended on the warm waters of the hot pools and the aurora borealis came out to greet us…

And now the village is alight with Christmas lights and the wind is howling gently outside. Sometimes the house creaks, and it is snowing again! On stiller days, in the small window of daylight, I take a walk out of the back door and down the lane and I feel the way I first did, the reason I came here. The reason so many visitors leave transformed.

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