“I’ve just been in my own little bubble with Björk”: Meet the creative right-hand man of the Icelandic icon

Björk’s universe is one of intergalactic and outlandish strangeness, in which she is the high priestess. Despite all that she’s given us artistically, the Icelandic icon, now 58, remains a total enigma. But if anyone could claim to really know Björk, it is her long-time creative collaborator James Merry. British-born, Reykjavík-based Merry has been by Björk’s side for around 15 years in a vast range of capacities, most notably as craftsman of the objets d’art that are her signature masks.

Amongst Björk’s ever-evolving colour and chaos, Merry’s masks are a constant. Through their close working relationship, Merry intuitively understands and enriches Björk’s artistic vision. “I will really tune into the shapes, the colours and the textures that she’s liking,” he says. “It’s definitely kind of merged into my own tastes and it’s hard to untangle sometimes. I’m not really sure what is my taste or hers anymore. But it’s a healthy overlap, almost like a third entity floating between us.”

The entanglement also stems from their inherent creative kinship, with the pair sharing a style that Merry describes as “a little biological but with some modern twist – sometimes punk, sometimes rough”. While Merry now operates as a creative equal, his alliance with Björk began more in the form of a personal assistant. Originally meeting through mutual friends, they instantly clicked and Merry was soon working with her “every day from nine to five, travelling with her, in meetings with her, and dealing with her 700 emails a day,” he explains.

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“Every now and then in the evening, while watching Netflix, I would make a mask that I knew might fit something that was coming up.” Now, his intricately sculptural masks, which have also been worn by Tilda Swinton and inspire streams of fan-made replicas, are ubiquitous in the world of Björk. Still, they have their limitations. “I make them knowing that Björk may perform in them, so I can’t cover the mouth, and I can’t cover the eyes too much because she has to see where she’s going, and that’s already quite a lot of real estate of the face,” he explains. Hence, a foray into footwear held the appeal of greater freedoms.

Considering Merry’s mother is an archaeologist specialising in the Roman empire, his father a history fanatic and that he holds a degree in Classical Greek from Oxford University, it’s apt that an obscure artefact was the starting point for his first pair of shoes. A few years ago during a visit to the National Museum of Ireland – Merry regularly visits museums whenever touring globally with Björk – he stumbled across inspiration: Celtic patten shoes from the Middle Ages, with thick wooden soles propped up on stilts to protect the working-class wearer from the depths of mud and snow. When it came time to conceive the design for Merry’s own shoes, this mediaeval relic was first to be plucked from the archives of his mind.

But now, with the shoes completed and captured on the cover of Björk’s new album Fossora, it’s clear the references didn’t begin and end with the patten shoes. Described by Merry as “more ceremonial than practical”, the towering footwear takes an otherworldly fossilised form, with undulating 3D-sculpted foundations that swirl like solidified ink blots. “I will start designing or sculpting something and then afterwards realise what it looks like,” Merry says, listing sea creatures, whale vertebrae and molar teeth as shapes that he now recognises in the shoes. “Also, every single thing that I make ends up looking really sexual, like reproductive organs.

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Atop Björk’s shoes (a size 38, for those curious) are glinting silver botanical fronts. Sculpted by Merry, the shape is modelled on the tunglurt flower, a member of the fern family that he discovered in his own garden just outside the Icelandic capital. The most notable detail, however, are two small eggs, which sit cradled within the heel of each shoe. While they could be mistaken for simple granite or volcanic rock, the eggs are, in fact, a scientific breakthrough: stone from deep underground which has been infused with calcified carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. Talk about well-heeled.

In an act of closeness with his art, Merry assigns each of his creations with its own name. These shoes have been dubbed Völubein, an Icelandic word for a small bone in the ankle, and also for the sheep bones historically used for fortune-telling. With similar artistic intimacy, Merry has also spoken before of remembering exactly what he was listening to, or who was with him in the room, as he was crafting something – especially embroidery. “I also have it with certain masks, and it’s often really trashy reality TV,” he admits, laughing. “So when I see the masks, it’s a funny thing for me, that I’m like, that actually really reminds me of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

For Fossora, Björk’s tenth studio album, she figuratively plummets below the Earth’s surface for the album cover, shot by emerging Icelandic photographer Vidar Logi. Balancing on the Merry’s CO2-infused Völubein shoes, Björk was perched on top of a huge set almost two metres high and eight metres wide, crafted to depict the underworld with weird root systems and thousands of mushrooms – both real and sculpted. The album’s release follows two concurrent tours: the unplugged Björk Orchestral which engages local musicians, and the immersive, theatrical extravaganza of Cornucopia.

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Merry forms part of the core team accompanying Björk, and while he describes the touring mood as “cosy”, keeping up with their shared creative epiphanies makes for frenzied work. “I think I must be room service’s worst nightmare,” he says. “I literally set up a studio in my hotel room. That’s normally what I’m doing on tour, I’m racing to some hardware shop to buy something and then coming back to my room to make something with it. I would say 75 per cent of masks that I’ve made so far have been created frantically in a hotel room the night before a concert.”

When he’s not devising and engineering new masterpieces in hotel rooms around the world, Merry is at home with his Icelandic partner, whom he very recently married in a small ceremony in the country’s north. Speaking over Zoom while in the midst of the UK leg of Björk’s most recent tour, Merry radiates a sense of contentment when discussing his adopted home. “I feel like there are more hours of the day there,” he says of Iceland. After a decade of living in Reykjavík, and with citizenship application papers now “sitting on the laptop’s desktop, staring at me”, Merry has clearly found his own sense of belonging.

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“I wasn’t really making much stuff before I moved to Iceland. When I was living in London and New York, I was a frustrated artist. I knew that I had it in me, but I just never seemed to have the clarity or the headspace. It was only when I decided after working with Björk, I thought, ‘OK, I belong in Iceland’, and I moved. That was the year that I started making stuff.”

Often working exclusively with local materials, as was the case with the fashioning of the Völubein shoes, the Icelandic environment seems to offer Merry an infinite wealth of creative resources. “Everything I make is so connected with Iceland, and my work set up is so perfect for the way that I want to live. It’s out in nature and I’m so often being inspired. Like the tunglurt fern that I found in my garden, things are just coming out of my surroundings.”

While Merry is, in many ways, Björks creative right-hand man, delving into the rich and fantastical world of her albums, touring and artistry uncovers a dedicated legion of collaborators. This tightly-knitted network of genius minds – of both the creative and scientific sort – includes Irma Studios, an Icelandic institution with a jack-of-all trades production team delivering on the wildest of briefs from both Björk and Mery, including the 3D sculpting of the Völubein shoes.

Speaking about the collaborative backbone of Reykjavik’s creativity community, Merry says “it is definitely more supportive between artists In Iceland than in other places that I’ve lived, where it is more dog-eat-dog and everyone is on a frantic climb over each other’s heads to try and get to the top. But in Iceland, because it is so small, you can’t really get away with behaving like that.”

Behind the unbreaking trajectory of Björk’s one-of-a-kind career, the long-standing creative collaboration with Merry remains as strong as ever. “I don’t think that’s going to change,” he says. “The mask thing might not be happening in five years’ time, but I’m sure there will be something else that I’ll be making. It’s just an intuitive flexibility to go with whatever feels right at the time, and I can’t see that ending.”

And his contribution to Björk’s bold and disruptive artistry is paying off, as he shares that, “after ten years as an immigrant in Iceland, I feel like slowly, some of the companies and museums are starting to notice me.” But, Merry adds, that kind of recognition has never been particularly high on the agenda for him. Instead, it’s all about the joy of the craft. In Merry’s own words: “I’ve just been in my own little bubble with Björk."