Iceland!

Last year I did a module with Roxane Permar up in Shetland called 'Art and Social Practice'. I wasn't sure what to expect, except that it would be well out of my comfort zone, and that's usually a good thing.

In the end, the power of it really impressed me. I really love the way that everyone has a creative imagination. If you're able to help them tap into that, as an artist, and 'nudge' a process along with a collaborative arts project, then the outcomes can be incredibly powerful, and completely unpredictable. I worked with the local primary school on 'Project Wild Millbuie' to unlock the 'Wild' in them by building a relationship with a forest. What I found was the whole was way more than the sum of its parts, and we were all changed in some way by the creative process.

So when Roxane was seeking applications for the Iceland leg of the international collaborative arts project Northern Exchange: Cold War Histories and Nuclear Futures (http://timespan.org.uk/explore/artists/northern-exchange-roxane-permar-susan-timmins/) I thought I'd go for it. The project has already worked with communities in Russia and Alaska as well as Scotland and England. By luck, and perhaps because I am well old enough to remember the Cold War first hand (and lived in Russia for a couple of years) I managed to get one of the two student places on the trip!

The project is an international, collaborative, community based art project which will conclude with an exhibition and related public events in Reykjavik. Roxane and Susan are working with two artists who also teach at universities, Asta Jonsdottir (Iceland Academy of Arts) and Elina Harkinen (University of Lapland, Rovaniem, Finland)i. Each artist plans to bring two students from their respective universities to take part in the project.

The team will use methods drawn from socially engaged and place based art practices to explore the Cold War period as it exists physically in the landscape and in the memory. In Iceland we will work with participants in four remote communities, which in common with many other northern and Arctic
populations, hosted radar installations as part of NATO’s early warning defence system thus putting them in the front line for defence during the Cold War.

The project offers students the opportunity to learn new skills in socially engaged and place-based art practices by assisting the international team of artists who themselves will be working in new contexts and situations. Students can also gain understanding of our northern neighbours in the context of our
Cold War past and nuclear futures.


The next challenge is to find funding for the flights and food. I think I may have to take my tent!!!