NES Artist Residency, Skagaströnd, Iceland

During May and June 2026, I attended an artist residency in the small fishing village of Skagaströnd in northern Iceland. During the residency, I collaborated with my husband, contemporary composer Geoff Lynch, on our first joint project, Variations.

The work brings together Geoff’s original composition, written in Skagaströnd for string quartet and transcribed onto silk, alongside a suspended hand-stitched silk and cotton textile. The cotton and silk were dyed using ice, rust and ink before being exposed to Iceland’s unpredictable weather.

Inspired by the principles of atonal music, the project explores tension, movement and transformation through both sound and cloth. The stitched lines loosely reference the tension between control and chance while also evoking musical notation, tracing rhythm and interruption. By allowing the cloth to evolve through exposure to wind, rain, ice and time, the landscape itself became a collaborator, introducing chance and spontaneity into the work.

Drawing on the musical concept of variation, where a theme is continually transformed, I layered and weathered multiple lengths of silk, allowing each to develop independently. The resulting interconnected panels represent the instrumental voices of the quartet, with overlapping translucent layers echoing the way musical ideas evolve while maintaining a connection to their original form.

By combining textile processes, environmental forces and contemporary composition, Variations translates sound into material form, creating a dialogue between music, landscape and cloth. Through a balance of intention and chance, the work explores how repetition, variation and collaboration can lead to transformation.