Come At Me 2018

All of a sudden it looks like we're on the cusp of a new year. And what a year 2017 has been... I would go into more detail but time is of the essence. I'm about to catch the bus over the Helsinki to meet up with mama and papa, who have flown in for a whirlwind visit. There are a few more new years and new year-adjacent plans while I'm in and around the capital but I'll fill in the blanks next year!

For now, feast your eyes on the drawing up above that I pulled an all nighter to get through last night/this morning. It's simultaneously the best and worst stippling I've ever done - based from a photo of the rain-lashed windows back at Sumburgh Head. It was rough, but I'm glad I'm over that mountain. 

Happy New Year! (Hyvää Uutta Vuotta)

Hyvää Joulua

So it's Christmas! It's a bit surreal that I'm celebrating out here, of all places, but it's a nice break from the norm. The festivities have been pretty quiet for the most part, and like other Finns I did most of the celebrating yesterday. 

I went over to Renja's place in the evening for their Christmas fiesta. Renja prefers a quieter Christmas, so it was only the five of us - her and Benkku, their daughter Helmi, and Benkku's mother Arla. Nevertheless, we had enough food to feed a small village. The traditional Finnish Christmas starts with a cold course of smoked/preserved fish, pickles and salad followed by the main course that involves the usual suspects of turkey and ham, as well as baked and mashed swedes (lanttulaatikko), potatoes and other root vegetables. To drink there was vodka-spiked glögg, straight up vodka and beer, so by the end of it all I was feeling pretty overwhelmed and overfed.

Dessert was provided by yours truly, even though dessert would usually be the last thing I'd volunteer to take care of. It was my first time making an apple pie from scratch - pastry and all - and I was pretty pleased with the end product! The only downside was that it was a bit hard to truly enjoy said pie when we were already so full of food at that point. 

Given all that wintery darkness, it's also commonplace in Finland to honour departed loved ones by visiting cemeteries and lighting candles to honour the dead. On the way home we stopped by the church cemetery in Korpo and Renja gave me a candle for Yi Po as well as Charlie. It felt good to honour them in this small way and make sure they weren't forgotten. 

Solstice

So, the winter solstice came and went. It was a beautiful day, but as with any other day my initial plan was to stay cooped up inside to work. Fortunately Renja was so excited by the clear sky and the golden light that she basically forced me to get out for a bit. I'm glad that she did so. 

Whether it's global warming or just the latitude that we're at, I don't think I'll be getting a white Christmas. The snow has all melted and the temperature has stayed just a hair above 0 for the most part, hence stopping any more snow from falling or staying on the ground. But nevertheless, it's still a beautiful place to be, and the consensus is that January and February are generally colder months. 

I biked into town to pick up Christmas things, and I was pleased to find that my body wasn't screaming out in protest as much as my first ride a few weeks ago. I took my film camera out for a spin instead so the photos above are not from yesterday specifically. Anyway, all was going well and good, until a little way into the ride home. I must have slid over a lone icy patch of the road and I crashed pretty spectacularly, launching the basket off the bike and most of my shopping with it. My pants are no more as I tore a massive bloody hole in one knee and my hands got cut up when I landed on my palms. Luckily no one was around to see my dented ego splayed out on the asphalt. The adrenalin kept me going until I got home to staunch the bleeding and bandage myself up. Lots of couch potato-ing ensued. Happy solstice to me.

Excursions

It's far too easy to lose track of time out here, as I'm sure I've mentioned repeatedly in previous posts. During the more intense periods of travel, the constant stream of movement and activity helped to signpost each day and offer up plenty of things to write about. On the other hand the combination of the dark and cold, coupled with the majority of my time flitting between various projects/experiments means that I don't really consider the day-to-day stuff really worthy of a write up. 

So there's my disclaimer out of the way. Things have been getting a little busier in the build up to Christmas, despite what I initially assumed would be a quiet and pleasantly dull affair... Over the weekend Renja took me to the Christmas market held at the local town hall. It was very much one of those requisite Christmas activities that forces you into the Christmas mood with stalls of mostly candles, woollen socks and gingerbread. I met a few more locals and there was a performance by some local girls to commemorate the feast day of Santa Lucia - a Scandinavian winter tradition that seems to have transcended its Christian origins.

A few days later I was invited to another traditional part of the Swedish Christmas (the archipelago being a much more Swedish-influenced area) - a Glögg party. It's an excuse for people to visit friends and basically sit around drinking glögg (warm mulled wine) and eating biscuits. Parties involving younger families and children will feature non-alcoholic glögg and I suppose with certain other age brackets the parties would be proportionately rowdier. It definitely sounds a lot more economical to see everyone this way instead of pulling out a full blown multi-course feast and trying to wrangle everyone into a single time and place. 

The next day I caught an early bus up to Turku for a quick visit. I say 'early', but it was around 10am. I can't stress enough how difficult it is to get out of bed in the mornings here. I usually work late into the night, and the general darkness just doesn't give me any real burning desire to leap out of bed. Anyway, my main reason for the quick excursion was admittedly a bit lame - I wanted to see the new Star Wars. It also meant I could stock up on alcohol and few other bits and pieces that aren't available down on the island. Renja emailed her students at the arts academy and luckily Sofie came to my rescue and graciously offered me the bed left vacant by her housemate for the night. 

I won't go into details, because this is not a film review, but I did enjoy The Last Jedi. I'm not a die hard fan in the way that I am towards say Lord of the Rings, but I do still feel a kick of excitement when the opening crawl starts a'crawling. There were a few strange segues and some glaring plotholes/contrivances, but I respect the general ballsiness of the creative team to do away with the Skywalker dynasty and take the franchise into new and unexpected territory, as opposed to just working to placate the rabid fans. 

That was last night, and today I found time to hit a few galleries with Sofie before she went to work. I had some time to kill before my return bus and I'm glad I did because I went into a barber on a whim and finally got a long overdue haircut. As much as I was trying to ignore the matted forest forming on my head, things were getting pretty dire. My last haircut was back in August in Edinburgh before Jake had arrived. I'm now feeling cleaner and a lot lighter from the neck up. Goodbye incidental mullet. 

It's now just a few more days until Santa arrives, and I'll be going along to Renja's family Christmas before I see Mum and Dad next week. They're making a brief appearance in Helsinki after which I'll go along to new years with Outi and her gang. This wasn't really at all what I had imagined coming out to Korpo, but it looks to be an interesting silly season nonetheless.

Forest Walks

As usual, time seems to be moving differently here. It's been a week or so now and I've spent most of my days in the apartment tinkering on different things. The weather has stayed fairly manageable. On certain days and nights the snow will fall rapidly to remind me that it's indeed winter here, but a few subsequent days of above 0C will melt away the snow and replace it with rain. In any case, it's good to know there's a sauna in the basement at the ready when I need it.

Renja took me through the Barefoot Path last week. It's an art project that she's spearheaded alongside Sandra - another local artist. The path winds through the woods past environmental, site-specific pieces created by local and international artists. I think the program runs in the summer, when there's more light for artists to come and stay for shorter, more intense periods. Some pieces only stay up for a season, while others - such as the ones we saw - are designed to last more permanently into the darker months.

She also showed me a nearby lake, which was still and barely frozen over, but she told me how it's ideal for swimming in the summer. I like the stillness of everything now, and as much as I'd enjoy endless daylight hours I would probably also feel a bit crankier thanks to the clouds of mosquitoes that emerge from said lakes in the warmer months. 

The apartment sits just near the ferry connecting Korpo to its neighbouring island, but the actual town of Korpo lies another 9km inland. In between snowfall and with a few things to pick up I decided to take one of the bikes into town. The road was flat for the most part, but I honestly can't remember the last time I went on an extended bike ride, let alone one on a fixed gear. I had a coffee and cinnamon bun at the cafe and did a lap around the grocery store before riding back home. My thighs were on fire by the time I got back, just to remind me once again that I could not have picked a more sedentary career path for me and my fat ass. 

Tervetuloa

So here we are! Finally at residency #4 here on the quiet island of Korpo. It ended up being a 2 day transit from Shetland to Finland as I had to spend a night in Aberdeen and another night in Helsinki for all the various planes and buses. There aren't any direct flights between Aberdeen and Helsinki so I had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it stop in Paris. According to my boarding pass there was about an hour between flights, but I had completely forgotten how gargantuan Charles de Gaulle was. To get from my arriving terminal to my boarding gate I was made to go through two security checks, a twenty minute shuttle bus and a brief venture out into the arrivals hall. By then I was starting to panic that I'd miss the connecting flight, or that my luggage would be left behind in some dusty forgotten corner of CDG. Fortunately the flight was inexplicably delayed by about an hour (maybe to track down my bags?), so my mad dash through various terminals was in vain.

I was picked up by Outi at Helsinki. We were neighbours and travel buddies for 3 months back at Nes so it was lovely and surreal to be reunited again after all this time. She drove us into the city, which is unsurprisingly just as beautiful in winter as it is in summer (when I last visited on a family trip in 2010). I dumped my bags at a cheap hostel and was excited to go out and pay someone for dinner for the first time in over two months. After pizza and beer Outi took me to her stunning apartment for a few more drinks and to show off said-stunning-apartment. I was reminded of how much I hated hostels that night when I was woken up at about 4am by some drunk guy stumbling in and snoring at the top of his lungs. 

Korpo sits about 4 hours from Helsinki in the Turku archipelago at the south west corner of the country. Heading further west gets you to the autonomous Åland Islands and Sweden on the other side of the Baltic Sea. Looking at a map it looks like this part of the sea has been sprayed with an overly eager confetti cannon. There are literally thousands of tiny islands sprinkled all along the coastline, and I can definitely see why this place would be so popular during the summer months. 

Renja and Benkku are the lovely couple who run AARK residency. They met me at the nearby bus stop and took me to my new home for the next three months. My studio space and living quarters are all on the second floor of a larger building that overlooks the ferry connecting Korpo to neighbouring Storlandet. There's space for another artist or two, but for this month at least I will be on my own (barring last night and today, when Renja had over two visiting students - Lydia and Sanna-Liisa - from her class at the Turku Arts Academy). Renja and Benkku divide their time in the apartment downstairs as well as their other home about 9km away in the main town on the island.

Although I'm once again alone in my work space, it's refreshing that there are at least some people around who 1) know that I exist and 2) are nominally interested in what I'm doing here. It turns out that Renja has also been reading this blog, so if you're reading right now, hello Renja! After dumping my bags, Renja drove me into town to give me a quick tour as well as to buy groceries. It's always fun to go grocery shopping in foreign countries - for me it's the first step in figuring out a place. I had a great night's sleep after a sit in the basement sauna. It felt right to spend my first day of the residency sitting in a sauna!

The space is really lovely and cosy. It was snowing in Helsinki when I arrived but everything seems to have melted here now. Still, it feels like I have a great few months ahead of me hidden away on this beautiful island. 

Next

I'm currently sitting in a very clean studio space, waiting for my ride to the airport. Everything's packed up and I'll be flying off to Aberdeen in about two hours. Tomorrow morning I'll take a couple of flights and arrive in Helsinki for the last and longest chunk of this whole long-winded odyssey.

Thinking back, it feels odd that two months have passed here. So much and so little has happened. I tend to go for a more glass half empty approach when looking back on what I've done, and I'll always feel that I could have done more. Shetland was different to Iceland in that each day wasn't filled with a grand sense of wonder or a steady stream of pinch-yourself moments. That's just the way it is - before Iceland I was already SO keen to visit whereas Shetland didn't come with such a preconceived notion of thrilling expectation. 

Still, I loved being out here on my own, and I don't regret a thing. There are ideas and tangents to continue when I get to Korpo and when I eventually land back in Melbourne, which is a good thing. There was finally some lasting snow that came in overnight, and from what I can see Aberdeen also got a good dusting. All good omens heading into part 3 of 3.

More Rocks More Waves More Grey

Another day, another coastline to explore! (Are you sensing a theme here?) On Tuesday I veered west to Northmavine, a chunk of Mainland that’s connected only by a tiny ithmus. I pulled up at Esha Ness - another spectacular peninsula with a lighthouse and a fragmented coastline to explore. Silly me missed my alarm, so I lost time by not setting out before sunrise, which in turn made my excursion a little more hurried. Regardless of that, the rocks and waves were breathtaking, in particular the sea stack Dore Holm with its gaping archway. 

Heading back down to the car rental I stopped for lunch at Britain’s most northerly fish and chip shop in Brae. I realised it was the first meal outside of a lighthouse in what felt like years. The chips were a bit stodgy but the doorstopper sized piece of haddock was crispy, juicy and delicious. I’m not one to photograph my food so just imagine cold windswept Brian stuffing his face with delicious fried food. 

All in all it was a short but sweet road trip. I wish I could say that I had spent more time exploring Shetland in the last two months, but this was better than nothing. The climate and weather definitely felt like more of a hindrance compared to other places I've travelled to. I should at least be glad that I don’t need to deal with the alternative of a hyped up locale that’s crawling with other tourists waving selfie sticks and telescopic lens'. 

Island Hopping

With so little time, I thought the best way to make the most of the car would be to take it as far north as possible. It just so happened that the coastline along the top end of Unst (the northernmost of the main islands) is pretty spectacular, so I set off super early the next day. Owing to the limited hours of light, I set my alarm for an ungodly hour and was in the car driving north in the dark by 6am. For the record it took about 3 and a half hours to go from the bottom to the top. 

To get to Unst I first had to take a ferry from Mainland to the connecting island of Yell. I was told by more than one person that Yell is boring and monotonous. Whether or not that’s true is beside the point, as I didn’t have time to see everything anyway. From the docks at the bottom I cleared Yell in about 25 minutes to reach the ferry bound for Unst on the top end. True to form it was an uneventful drive. 

After the second ferry I then drove to the top of Unst, where the northern headland of Hermaness has been set aside as a bird and wildlife sanctuary. I walked across some slippery walkways and paths through fields that become nesting grounds for endemic bird species in the springtime - now only occupied by cold-resistant sheep. During last month's brief detour back home I managed to get a replacement pair of hiking boots. The old pair, while sturdy, were also completely rubbish at keeping out moisture, something that isn’t helpful in a country that never seems to dry completely. The new pair proved to be a good investment as I scaled the sea cliffs and muddy fields after the boardwalks with comfortably dry warm feet. 

Muckle Flugga is the name of the tiny islet that sits just off the coast. Together with the appropriately named Out Stack a little further up, it's the northernmost point of Britain. You could call it the full stop to the British Isles. Against all odds there's also a lighthouse on Muckle Flugga, and at one point it was manned by some poor soul that had the joy/misfortune of calling that rocky outcrop home. (It's now automated)

Getting back to the car I drove around the rest of Unst to find that nothing much else was open. Bobby's Bus Shelter is a bus stop near the village of Baltasound that was saved from demolition by a kid called Bobby and each year is decorated with a different theme, although they always keep up a sofa, tv, phone and pot plants. I didn't check to see if the appliances worked. 

On my search for a coffee, I drove through maybe the most depressing settlement I had come across yet. Saxa Vord is a former air force radar station that is now trying to transition into some sort of tourist hub. I can't say if it was because of the time of year, or because it was still a work-in-progress, or because every building was dank and grey, but the place felt utterly miserable. There wasn't a person in sight, and I drove off thinking of all the places I'd rather be than Saxa Vord.

I headed home not long after. I honestly couldn't find much else to do, with all of the tourist-related options closed and the rain starting to get heavier. There was at least time for a coffee in Lerwick - at least things mercifully stayed open in the 'big smoke'. 

Managing Time

As with all places at this latitude at this time of year, every day seems to be shorter than the last. It’s gotten to the point now that if I wake up to a fully lit bedroom, I feel a slight wave of disappointment, knowing that I’ve already wasted some precious daylight hours for that day asleep in bed. With these limited hours to play with (roughly 6 hours of light each day) I had to plan my little road trip properly. The weather is also typically uncooperative - I don’t know if any day has gone by these past two months without either sheets of rain or howling winds hanging about for part or all of the day. Certainly I haven’t experienced a single day of clear cloudless sky; grey seems to be the colour of choice around these parts. 

I kept an eye on the wind forecast most of all. Rain I could at least deal with if it was coming down vertically instead of whipping me right in the face. Seeing a patch of calm over the weekend past I booked in a car on Sunday and walked down to the airport to pick it up. On top of being the lighthouse custodian, Tony also mans the tourist info desk at the airport, so he gave me some suggestions on where to go and what to do. Compared to Iceland and the Faroes, tourism in Shetland really does come to a grinding halt around the end of September. That means I get this wonderful space all to myself, but also that my options for sightseeing would be limited to the great outdoors. Almost all visitor centres, museums, cafes and some accommodation close or operate on heavily scaled back hours.

After getting the car in the afternoon on Sunday, I took it to nearby St Ninian’s Isle. The island isn’t technically an island, as it’s connected by a picturesque 500m long tombolo, or ayre - otherwise known as a sand bar. I took a stroll over to the island and climbed over some of the winding sea cliffs as the sun was starting to set (around 2ish). 

From there I drove to Bonhoga Gallery in Weisdale. To my knowledge there isn’t a dedicated non-commercial gallery space in Shetland so this looked like the next best thing, although Weisdale is also a 20 minute drive beyond Lerwick. There was a neat semi-retrospective by local Shetlander Maxie Bain with some watercolours he had done of the local landscape, as well as other shows dotted around the space. It was already dark by the time I walked out of there at 4, and being so far down south the drive back to the lighthouse took about an hour. 

To Do Lists

So I'm now at the stage of figuring out what I can finish off with the time that I have left to me. I think 10 views of the sea at Bressay and Sumburgh respectively is a healthy amount. That leaves 40(!!!!) more to get through in the next three months. Difficult but doable. 

I have a few more paintings and drawings to finish up, depending on how well I can manage my time. I'm not one to leave loose threads hanging I guess, even though the easy option would be to relax and think of all the time I have to get things done in Finland next month. 

Week 2 and 3 down

So the inevitable blogging slump happened. Who would've thought that a weekly update on my work would've been just a stretch too far? Things have been going well. The studio continues to be a beautiful dream and I found time to hastily rent a car and take it for a quick spin around the place, for fear of actually going through two months of living here and only seeing as far as out my studio window. It's now terrifyingly my last week here and I have things to do! Clock's a ticking. Finland is waiting.