Iceland review - 2015, Side 64

62 ICELAND REVIEW
We almost saw the sun today!”
says Irish visual artist Sinéad
Onóra Kennedy, bursting with
excitement. “We waited for two to three
hours, sat with hot water bottles under our
jackets. You could almost see it.”
Here in the fishing town of Ólafsfjörður
(population 800), in a fjord of the
same name at the mouth of the much
larger Eyjafjörður fjord, the sun disappears
behind the roughly 1,000-meter (3,280-
feet) peaks in late November—and it isn’t
until late January, a whole two months
later—that it re-emerges.
The only way into the town by road is
via tunnels on each side. Take the north-
ern tunnel and 16 km (10 miles) later
the supermarket started to run out of sup-
plies… We started going a bit crazy after
being indoors so long. Everything depends
on the weather here,” Sinéad remarks.
CELEBRATING THE SUN
While Sinéad and her partner Joe Scullion,
also a visual artist from Ireland, admit the
short days and poor weather have been
challenging, they’ve embraced their time in
Ólafsfjörður for the inaugural two-month
Skammdegi (meaning ‘short days’) win-
ter artist residency program at the local
Listhús art space. Sinéad and Joe are among
the 11 artists taking part in the program
when I visit on January 21. Along with
you’ll reach the larger fishing town of
Siglufjörður, colloquially known as ‘Sigló.’
One of the country’s most populated towns
during the herring boom of the first half
of the 20th century, Siglufjörður now has
a population of 1,200. Take the eastern
tunnel and you’ll head south to yet another,
slightly larger, fishing community: Dalvík.
The North Iceland ‘capital’ of Akureyri is a
60-km (37-mile) drive away.
Heavy snow and winter storms occur fre-
quently in this part of the country. For two
weeks in the lead-up to Christmas last year,
unusually bad weather left people more or
less confined to their homes for days. “We
were waiting for some post but the van
didn’t come, the buses weren’t running,
In the darkness of winter, a group of 11 artists, writers and musicians
from across the globe came together in one of Iceland’s northernmost
towns, Ólafsfjörður, for a two-month residency program.
BY ZOË ROBERT. PHOTOS COURTESY OF ANNIE LING, ANTON BENOIS, NASTASYA TAY AND YIANNIS HADJIASLANIS.
WAITING FOR THE SUN
PHOTO BY ANNIE LING.