A year ago, halfway my artist residency in northern Iceland, I received some depressing news from the home front. After a sleepless night I felt the need to be alone the next morning. I borrowed a bike and rode to the black sand beach I had discovered earlier that week. Biking through town and along the unpaved road separating meadows, and against the wind, I reached the beach. I parked my bike against a fence post and went for a stroll along the coastline, taking in the scent of the sea and the sounds of the waves, and the view of the Atlantic ways away from Coney Island. I sauntered along the surf, pensively, head down, thinking, processing. I picked up a piece of plastic trash, its bright red standing out against the lava sand—a piece of some object once used by someone, somewhere. Who knows how long ago, and where it entered the ocean’s vastness. Did it travel along the Eastcoast, finding Iceland riding the gulf stream? Who knows…
At first, this beach seemed pretty pristine, like much of the landscape I had encountered so far. Yet, I started seeing and picking up more tidbits of man-made debris the ocean dropped off north of Skagaströnd, collecting them in my shoulder bag.
Riding the wind back to town, I thought of using these bits of polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC and the kind, to collage letters and a compose a message, a word from the Atlantic expanse. Sea? What would the Icelandic word for ‘sea’ be? Hafið, I found out. Hafið means ‘the sea.’ I loved how foreign it looked, ending in an Icelandic character—the letter ‘eth’—representing the voiced dental fricative similar to the ‘th’ in ‘this’ and ‘that.’
I composed the letters, using mostly just beach finds, including a couple of feathers, to spell the word. I mounted them onto driftwood, drilling holes, using bits of barbecue skewer and a dab of hot glue, to attach the shards collected. A skinny piece of driftwood made for a good post.
Once the sign was ready I placed it first on the beach, and on the occasion of the ‘Opið Hus’—open house—at the end of the month, between the rocks that make up the sea barrier outside our studio, to welcome visitors. It stood there like a town sign identifying the beginning of another geographic entity. For me it marked the first feet of the distance between me and home.
Its spelling, and knowing that the ‘ð’ is similarly pronounced as our ‘th’, I thought of Hafiz, the 14th-century Persian poet, and how his poetry focuses on the transcendent power of love and the transformative effects of opening one’s self up to all experiences by embracing what it means to be a human being in the fullest sense, including one’s relationship with divine power. In one of his better known ghazals he writes:
Love is a sea which encircles the world and the water of the sea is fire;
waves come which are like the mountains of the place of darkness.
The Hafið sign has come to embody the memory of a time of blissful exploration punctuated by an undefined challenge, for me. Though the sign stood there firmly, just before I left, my ‘ð’ had lost its feather with cross bar. I imagine the word and the sign in time were taken apart by Iceland’s fierce elements for pieces to have ended among the rocks, the pebbles and crushed shells. And perhaps one or two ended up in the flow of the gulf stream again, to continue their journey to other faraway lands.
Meanwhile, I am home again, and last year’s news has led to the necessary actions, procedures, and desired outcomes. All is well, now, a year later. And my month at Nes Artist Residency and the people I met there—fellow artists, and locals—keep informing my explorations in the arts, my studio practice, and life in general.