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blóm + blóð (Icelandic for flowers + blood) is an 8-minute silent digital video that presents performance as embodied research, situating the landscape as laboratory and studio. Created during a month-long residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre in Blönduós, the work follows the artist through the autumnal terrain of northern Iceland as she gathers natural dye and fibre materials, uses landscape elements as tools, and experiments with flora and fauna in the making of a textile work.
The film is silent and unfolds through subtitled text in blended English and Icelandic, which functions as a procedural and poetic register. The subtitles describe dye processes and material techniques while weaving in local lore, seasonal knowledge, and ecological impressions, positioning language itself as a site of situated knowledge transfer. The resulting textile is never revealed within the video; instead, the emphasis remains on process as the primary site of creative labour and knowledge production.
By mobilizing the landscape as a laboratory, the work moves beyond outdoor material sourcing to foreground experiential learning, ecological awareness, and relational ethics with environmental agents. The video engages questions of temporality, labour, and material agency, drawing on Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, which understands agency as emerging through the collaboration and interference of human and nonhuman forces. Romanticized notions of landscape, rooted in both art history and tourism are deliberately disrupted by the material realities of Icelandic life, including sheep slaughter and bodily labour. In exposing creative work to the open environment, the film subverts hegemonic notions of the studio as a hidden, isolated site of mastery.
The project was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology.
