Lucy willow

 ICELAND STUDIO RESIDENCY

DECEMBER 2015- JANUARY 2016

JOURNAL EXTRACTS

8th December

In the dust that lay hidden under the floorboard of the old factory I discovered a mysterious landscape reminiscent of the edge of the world. The sea was a thick paste that felt as though I was passing through dark and shadowy areas to reach its final shores. It lay untouched beyond the borders of the known world. The mist was thick and suffocating. Deep holes opened up on the uneven surface, entrances to the center of the earth, the underworld.

9th December

The factory in winter was frozen and cold, the cold that you can feel from the inside leaking out of your bones and filling the air around you. There was a hollow dark emptiness and mysterious glow to the landscape. The light was soft and permanent; a never-ending awakening. Beginnings and endings merged into one. The shores were black with the shadows that had been extracted from melancholic souls of distant past. It is difficult to find your bearings in a place with no familiar landmarks. There was no solid ground, a feeling that the earth was shifting and changing under your feet. I had to leave myself behind in order to come here. I imagined placing one foot carefully in front of the other so as not to slip on the permafrost as the ground opened up beneath me.

10th December

This series of photographic images plots a forgotten place. Dust and debris collect on its shores. I found grief and the sadness residing here, the rolling hills carrying the stories of all that has been discarded, abandoned. The space whispered its stories. Sometimes it is necessary to be on your hands and knees in order to discover what is forgotten. Grief does that. Its greatness and beauty is its ability to bring everything tumbling down. In the darkness on the horizon line I imagine Ophelia floating on her back on a black river of dust.

19th December

In the dust under the floorboards I understand the meaning of the word sublime, the terror and emptiness met with the joy of experiencing something greater than yourself. I see this as I look down between the gaps in the floor onto the pink twilight, the reflections of winter sun on snow, to the layers of fiberglass that form a haunting landscape. I feel the limitless landscape beneath me.  Under the floorboards everything is a mystery.

20th December

Victorian explorers arriving in Iceland for the first time believed they were looking into the mouth of hell, into the womb of the earth, into the black. I can feel this pull towards the night when I look at this landscape under the floorboards. Blackness is an internal feeling that makes sense on the inside. At night there are no edges to this dark space. The blackness of night in the northern hemisphere has no limits stretching out to touch itself before circling back again in the shadows.

24th December

Ungraspable and fluid the imagery continues to escape.  Looking into the abyss I can write the space into existence, breathing into the landscape with words. The absent past communicating its presence in the dust.

The silence that can be found in shadows, from watching their movement across empty spaces from seeking solitude in the shade comes with knowing death and the liminal world the experience occupies. Solace can be found in the layers of dust and grime, the layers of time that build up in untouched corners, on shelves and over objects.

 Lucy Willow extracts from journal entries to accompany a series of photographic landscape prints of dust under the floorboards of a fish factory. Artist residency in Stoovarfjorour, East Iceland, 2015. Book work can be purchased from CATALOGUE £125