In the spring of 2016 Ludmila Ketslekh traveled to Iceland together to attend NES Artist Residency in Skagastrond, in the north of Iceland. I spent a lot of time gather information about the country, trying to figure out what I might do while I was there. My first impulse was was to try to find a way to work with the Syrian Refugee’s. One of the most interesting thing Iceland was one of the first countries to agree to take in refugees.

I decided that the way I would engage them would be through Icelandic horses and Arabian horses. Iceland is a very welcoming culture, but there are very rigid rules around the conservation of ecosystems, nature and especially the Icelandic Horse.

Several months before leaving I started to collect Arabian and Icelandic plastic toy horses off the internet. And shipped them in advance to the residency so that they would be there in time to start my project. I soon discovered however that they majority of the Syrian Immigrants were settling in large city centers. Making it too costly to travel around to interview them. So with the permission of the school principle I decided to do the project with the students at the local school.

Each student was given a blank plastic Icelandic horse that they would decorate in anyway they liked with the paint provided. The Arabian Horses were given to the other Artist’s taking part in the Residency. As the teachers informed me that the students were learning about using QR symbols, I took a crash course myself and decided to use the technology that is far more common is Europe then it is America. Each horse had a tag on it that when scanned would take the finder to the Horsing Around Iceland: Found and Abandoned Art page.

At the end of the month at NES while travelling around the country with my husband, I would drop the children’s horses at different tourist stops with the hopes that the people who found them would follow the QR symbol to the facebook page to see who had made the horse they found.