Nancy Campbell2013-05-19T04:23:11-04:00Nancy Campbellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=nancy-campbellCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Nancy CampbellGood old fashioned elbow grease.Very Well Thus! Sea Journeys in Contemporary Arttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31728182013-04-28T04:27:33-04:002013-04-28T11:13:54-04:00Nancy Campbellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-campbell/
"Stories of sea journeys have long mesmerized readers, conjuring up images of hardship, survival, surprise discoveries and extreme weather," write the curators of Voyage: sea journeys, island hopping and trans-oceanic concepts, Imi Maufe and Rona Rangsch. The works on show represent both real and conceptual sea journeys; across oceans, between islands, over long distances or short moments; fictional, historical or contemporary. "No two journeys on the sea are the same, each has its own reason for taking place."
No two artists have the same response to the sea. For some, seafaring is as important as their creative practice. Artist and Able Seaman Caroline de la Fe writes: "At sea the world is cramped and vast, limited and free at the same time. ... Still this life is more real and tangible than nearly anything else I know, being so close to the forces of nature." In the book Sea Through My Eye De la Fe records this "surreal bubble containing only the sea, the ship and the daily routines" in photographs taken through the porthole of her cabin on the Norwegian ship Christian Radich.
A shorter journey is marked in Philippa Wood's 8 Minutes Across, a concertina book with eight pages that decrease in size to denote the passage of water and time on the Star Ferry between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. Each letterpress-printed page presents a typographic rendition of the crossing, the frenetic harbours, and the iconic ferry itself.
"The book can be regarded as a bridge: connecting drawing and photography, text and image, today and yesterday, Europe and America." So say Uta Schneider and Ulrike Stoltz of the German collective ‹usus›, whose work Boundless considers correspondences between boats and books, both as containers and means of transport. The artists' books in this exhibition carry the reader over many different seas; works include Judith Schalansky's quirky Atlas of Remote Islands - a surprise bestseller - and Turner Prize nominee Tacita Dean's Teighnmouth Electron.
To anchor notions of movement and change, tides and travel, on a static sheet of paper requires a new cartography. In David Lilburn's Sailing the South Coast, Smerwick to Youghal, drypoint lines depict the coast from the sailor's shifting perspective, rather than the landlubber's fixed viewpoint. Reminiscent of delicate records scratched on scrimshaw, this fragmentary map draws not only on Lilburn's memories of fifteen years sailing, but also the histories of the islands, ports and harbours, from the massacre of the Spanish expedition in Smerwick Harbour in 1580 to the cocaine haul off Mizzen Head in 2008.
While Lilburn's chart, albeit chaotic and partisan, could be of use to a fellow sailor, other artists turn the function of mapping on its head, using confusion to convey the volume, mass and isolating power of the ocean. Ding Ren uses existing maps as material for fantasy and collage. Her site-specific installation One to One takes maps de-accessioned from the National Geographic collection and subverts them, excising the island territories and placing these fragments in areas of the gallery that correspond to their shape. The artist has left a paper trail across the gallery - and the viewer's steps become those of an Odyssean giant, passing from one island to the next.
Walter Benjamin compared the past to the state of being at sea, writing "Memory does this: lets the things appear small, compresses them. Land of the sailor." In a similar spirit, John Cumming has created versions of sailors' Ditty Boxes, the caches of personal possessions allowed on board, "so small as to be manageable in a ship with almost no private space." Here, the seafaring life is represented by miniature mementoes of life on land - eggs, pebbles, shells and lichen, "the bare essentials of identity, self-maintenance and a hoped-for future."
But that future is elusive. Setting out to sea is a traditional metaphor for departure from life - Tennyson's "crossing the bar". The association with death is made in Matthew Herring's punning painting Wake and in Sally Waterman's Translucence, which records a catamaran ride across the Solent to attend a funeral. For other artists the sea represents modes of existence; in Gunnar Jónsson's film Hringsól, a fishing boat turns a futile circle in the sea, etching a temporary line on the water's surface. Even more evocative than these human traces are the innate qualities of the world's water, such as those presented in Sea of Curves by Jeff Talman. The American sound artist has recorded the "constant sound created by winds that stir up the surface of the oceans to create waves" in three locations: mid-Atlantic; Deer Lake, Newfoundland; and Coney Island, New York. The resulting work captures the "hum of the earth". The depths of the ocean may be far from everyday experience, but they cast significant reflections on our landlocked lives.
Picture credit: Ditty Box
John Cumming and Cecil Tait
2011
Dimensions variable
Wood, stone]]>Susan Richardson - Writing in the Language of Icetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28312912013-03-07T15:44:48-05:002013-05-07T05:12:01-04:00Nancy Campbellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-campbell/Susan Richardson was teaching a course on 'Intrepid Women Travellers' at Cardiff University when a reference to a Norse woman named Gudrid piqued her curiosity. Gudrid's ambitious journey from Iceland, across Greenland to Newfoundland at the start of the eleventh century is described in The Vinland Sagas.
The equally intrepid Richardson decided to follow in Gudrid's footsteps. She recorded her experiences in Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, a series of poems that charts the changing landscapes of the North and questions the nature of wilderness.
By sharing Gudrid's topography, "the environments which formed and fortified her", Richardson came to empathize with her. She started from the Snaefelsnes Peninsula in Iceland - "a thin peninsula, a bit like an arthritic finger, jutting out into the North Atlantic" - where Gudrid was born in a farm at the foot of the Snaefelsjokull volcano (now dormant). Beneath this dramatic, glacier-laden peak, Richardson was shown an ancient track through the lava that a local expert on Gudrid felt convinced she, too, would have used. "The coast alongside the lava field is made up of eccentric basalt cliff formations - caves, pillars, arches, blowholes. When I walked in this landscape, it was hard to believe that a millennium separated me from Gudrid".
At the end of her journey, off the remote northwestern tip of Newfoundland, Richardson took another step back in time. "I had the opportunity to sail along the coast on a replica Viking boat, and view the land from the sea. I imagined Gudrid huddled, night after cold cramped night, beneath her boat's half-deck, short of both food and fresh water, her skin raw with sores from wearing perpetually wet clothing. I was conscious of how easy my travels were in comparison, protected in my three-layer waterproofs."
Despite these close encounters Richardson knew that some aspects of Gudrid's experience were destined to remain "blurred and imprecise". Much of Gudrid's life is unknown to academics, but as a poet Richardson found that the absence of a firm "truth" gave her the freedom to fictionalize, "to invent, speculate and fill in the gaps".
As Richardson travelled across the Arctic she witnessed the impact of climate change. A concern for the preservation of the landscapes that Gudrid had experienced strengthened her commitment to environmental writing. She says, "I've become a passionate believer in the potential of poetry to make a difference, to inspire shifts in perception and create new patterns of thought and experience".
This concern is evident in Richardson's latest poetry collection, Where the Air is Rarefied, which examines the metaphorical significance of "the North" - a concept that resonates across different geographies and cultures. Richardson worked in collaboration with the artist Pat Gregory, drawing on a range of sources including Inuit folk tales, Icelandic sagas and polar explorers' narratives, as well as her own travels. As the collaboration progressed, Richardson found that Gregory's prints and the Arctic landscape itself had "a direct influence on the shape and structure of my writing". Her poems became "increasingly fragmented and pared-down", melting away like the ice itself; in the apocalyptic sequence, "Tip of the Ice-tongue" the poems have become footnotes to the prints.
Richardson says,"Writing about ice aroused ambivalent feelings in me. While experiencing a melancholic sense of loss, I remain fascinated by its propensity to shapeshift to liquid from solid, and by all its beautiful incarnations, be it glacier, berg, icecap or floe. I grew to relish, too, the language of ice - frazil, vuggy ice, growlers, nilas - and much as I appreciate dwarf willow and birch, muskeg and tundra, the squeak of saxifrage and the dazzle of fireweed, I came to realise that it's the whitest and most minimalist feature of the Arctic landscape that enthrals me the most".
Susan Richardson's publications are available from Cinnamon Press.
Picture credit: The Little Mermaid by Pat Gregory
29.5 x 29.5 cm unframed
Linocut and monoprint www.patgregory.co.uk ]]>Clare Carter - Recording in the Darktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24300762013-01-08T05:27:02-05:002013-01-08T09:23:48-05:00Nancy Campbellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-campbell/
Carter's understanding of landscape is multiple. It can be "inner and outer, physical and psychological, inhabited and uninhabited." She has mapped "the pathways and entry points between these worlds" using painting and, more recently, music as The Horn The Hunt, with composer/musician Joe Osborne.
Carter's work expresses curiosity about the ways humans adapt to different environments. Her interest in animist belief and ritual might suggest a preexisting sympathy with Inuit culture. Did she feel at home in Greenland during her residency at Upernavik Museum? "When I arrived, I was completely shell-shocked by the frightening environment. I couldn't contemplate the vastness of the landscape. I spent most of my time in Upernavik looking through books about north-west Greenland and its people. They contained mainly black and white photos, some very old. These photographs of people and the landscape made a visual link between myself as a westerner and the brutal nature of Greenland."
After initial concern over how to communicate this wild landscape on canvas, Carter began painting the photographs. The process helped her to understand her interest in illusion, as well as the role of performance and exhibition in her work. "If we can't understand what is different about other cultures we have to make small reconstructions or dioramas. Perhaps by taking the exotic and putting it through our own fabricating process we can begin to contemplate its reality."
The Cave, painted in Norway, places experiences and landscapes in a situation where they can be viewed as performance. Carter explains, "It's a modern cave painting. A man sits at a desk making music. The unfamiliar and unexplored landscape penetrates the room so that he is absorbed into it. The room and the landscape toy with each other for control of the stage."
Carter's painting, already veering toward the internal, the performative, was challenged by the residencies in the north. "The hardest thing about living in the darkness is that you have no view, no way of projecting emotions outwards. There is no landscape to absorb or give perspective on existence, except that of the domestic space. It's like being in a cell - you know there's space and life outside but you have no visual access to it. The only visuals are man-made: the electric light illuminating a path; lamps glowing inside a living room; the television projecting scenes from places with daylight. In a sense, everything becomes imaginary, an illusion - or if not an illusion, a human fabrication of 'day' in a nocturnal world."
While the Norwegian landscape blurs with domestic space in The Cave and other paintings, the Arctic landscape entered Carter's work even more intimately, as music. She dates her emergence as a composer to the winter in Upernavik: "One particularly dark day, Joe started playing this bass line with a sensual guitar effect. It seemed to merge with the silent inkiness of our surroundings. We had been encased in night for weeks, and things had started to get internalized. We had started to rely on sound more. The house we lived in was right next to the sea and the sound of the waves was a soothing omnipresence that seemed to wrap around us like a constant wind. We took some recordings of the sea and Joe manipulated them to be kind of percussive, but also elastic. I wrote a vocal line about leaving my old self behind and starting again. We didn't realize it at the time but this was to be the first song we would write as The Horn The Hunt."
The song was Whale's Belly (Eclipse), which was released in December accompanied by a film shot in Upernavik's semi-darkness. The listener needs patience to interpret the visual and musical nuances emerging from the dusk. The action that plays out in the darkness might best be described by the Greenlandic verb "iimivoq", which can be interpreted as either "water is drawn from the shore by the ebb of the sea" or "to call out for joy." The tide sighs under the ice, rising and falling, almost indistinguishable from the singer's breath. In this, as in other releases, The Horn The Hunt create a chilling union of human and earthly landscapes.
Picture credit: Clare Carter, The Cave, 2008.
250 x 130 cm
Oil & acrylic on canvas]]>Meliors Simms - Art in the Anthropocenetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.23953322013-01-02T07:56:12-05:002013-01-03T09:23:40-05:00Nancy Campbellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-campbell/Big Berg (pictured) is one of many interpretations of polar ice in Imagining Antarctica. Meliors Simms, a New Zealand artist, has used a range of textile techniques to explore the history of Antarctica, as well as its present environment and the threats to its future.
"New Zealand's proximity to Antarctica and significant activities there mean that Antarctica is a common theme for New Zealand artists," says Simms. With a background in Environmental Policy, Simms confesses that she turned to art as a result of "frustration with trying to effect change through policy channels."
Simms describes her work as "all about living in the Anthropocene." This unofficial geological term was recently coined to mark a period of human activity that has had a significant impact on the Earth's ecosystems. With her landscapes, mines and oil slicks, Simms reveals the force of this impact on different environments, and from various points of view - "a speculative future perspective, a deep-time perspective, and also from our present moment."
Simms' concern about climate change, pollution and over-consumption are not only demonstrated in the themes of her work, but also in the materials she uses. A Meliors Simms sculpture is likely to be composed of repurposed fabrics and offcuts. Likewise, her process entails a commitment to handwork rather than machining, in part to minimize the footprint of each work.
Simms has always enjoyed making things with her hands, but her identity as a visual artist emerged eight years ago while creating artist's books. Later, her working environment left her no choice but to make the bold move away from paper to alternative materials:
"Spending most of 2008 living in Australia's Daintree tropical rainforest put paid to my work with paper and I took up crochet and embroidery as a medium more compatible with that environment. Returning to New Zealand led to a transition where I was making books as well as stitching, but these days textile work is my main focus."
Simms has been considering how to represent the snow and ice textures of Antarctica for many years, and she found the perfect medium in textiles:
"I developed a new sculptural technique in order to realize my vision, cutting up old woven wool blankets along the contour lines of a map of Antarctica and embroidering them into a layered landscape relief. I began with a small representation of Ross Island and then started work on a large-scale map of the continent, My Antarctica, which ended up taking eight months of hand-stitching to complete."
But it's not just Antarctica that interests Simms. Her subsequent projects are concerned with extractive industries such mining and their impacts such as oil spills. An upcoming exhibition will feature a very large stitched work called Just a Little Spill which was made in response to an oil tanker spill off the Bay of Plenty coast (near Simms' home) in 2011. "Intensely black layers ooze across the gallery walls and floor. It's almost the antithesis of My (pristine, white) Antarctica. Another installation, exhibited in 2012, was made of delicate crocheted spheres suspended in a gallery window, representing the chemical dispersants used to clean up oil spills."
I asked Simms whether any particular artist or writer had influenced her Antarctic work. "My greatest inspiration is Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative novel, Antarctica. I turned to his writing again and again for the lyrical descriptions of snow and ice as I was attempting to make my own interpretations in wool. It's also a rip-roaring environmental thriller with a strong female lead character." A review in The New York Times is equally enthusiastic - this is one for every polar enthusiast to add to their reading list!
You can follow Meliors Simms on her blog Bibliophilia
Picture credit: Meliors Simms, Big Berg, 2011.
Hand-stitched cotton on vintage blankets with wool roving
260 x 450 x 170 mm]]>Drawing in Arctic Watertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22991812012-12-14T06:31:15-05:002012-12-14T08:53:59-05:00Nancy Campbellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-campbell/ Rowledge is a fine artist and an accomplished bookbinder, who uses found marks as well as literary texts in her work. Her practice seems to fall between two Victorian trades that are now almost obsolete: the public letter-writer who copies the thoughts of illiterate passers-by onto paper, and the psychic who channels more profound messages from beyond.
"It's a preoccupation - how and why we make marks, and what they mean to me and to other people. A mark always evokes an emotional response," Rowledge says. She rescues notes on scraps of paper discarded in London's gutters, and gold tools them onto leather, the gilt impression true to each scribble and smudge. Bookbinding enables her to use "a non-gestural process to create something that evokes movement and spontaneity - and yet it's completely embedded in the tradition and processes of gold tooling. I love that extreme play."
As a celebrant of human ephemera, how did Rowledge respond to the marks people have left on the Arctic environment? Although she couldn't transport her bindery with her on the ship, a similar sense of movement and constraint is at work in her Arctic Drawings.
Rowledge explains her process: "I took the right kind of paper to apply felt tip to so that the ink would bleed and the image would move. I had the paper cut so it fitted my suitcase and the cabin became my studio. I became very conscious of the movement of the boat and wondered what it would be like if I just leaned over the piece of paper with a pen and used my arm as a pendulum to create a drawing. I collected Arctic water in a cooking pot, and wet the sheet of paper in a baking tray, then left it to air dry in the cabin."
These works are quasi-scientific documents. Created by the movement of the ship with Rowledge as interpreter, they chart weather and water at a particular moment in time, which is noted on each drawing alongside the geographical coordinates. "I worked all the time we were on the boat, and set up a pendulum under the chair in my cabin, so that when I went ashore the drawings would be made in my absence. I recorded the date and time of each and the ship's coordinates - they are very site-specific, a record of our journey."
The scale of the marks and movement is intimate, at times infinitesimal on the large white sheet of paper. It is hard to imagine a more direct interaction with the environment. The association with the water that generated them is intense. "Each drawing is very different. You can see that sometimes the sea was very, very rough. Other drawings look like algae, they are calmer and more contemplative."
Although the bookbinder's craft isn't always about preservation, Rowledge has done a lot of book conservation work. But can the arts of the book protect the future of the environment?
Rowledge responds, "As soon as you feel the weight of what's happening with climate change you think 'Well, why bother making another object? What's the point really?' But then you get driven to make something because that's what it is in your make up to do. You make your ideas physical. They have to exist. You just focus on the idea and lose the bigger picture - that's survival."
Picture Credit: Arctic Drawing: Series 3, no.9
Cape Farewell 2008 Disko Bay Expedition
2 October
350 x 460 mm
Colour felt tip and Arctic water on paper
Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd]]>How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandictag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21637632012-11-20T19:00:00-05:002013-01-20T05:12:01-05:00Nancy Campbellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-campbell/Ilissiverupunga," muttered Beathe Berthelsen, the curator of Upernavik Museum. I'd only recently learnt that the word meant "Damn! I've put it away in a safe place and now I can't find it."
Mornings at the most northern museum in the world: an endless round of coffee and conversation as local hunters and fishermen drop in to discuss ice conditions. On my first day as Writer in Residence on this rocky island off the north-west coast of Greenland, I'd come to the museum looking for poetry books.
"Illilli!" Beathe called an hour later, "There you are!" She emerged from a cupboard hidden behind a stack of narwhal tusks, and presented me with a hymnbook bound in flocked wallpaper.
This was the only poetry I was to enjoy during my winter in Upernavik.
The Inuit have a tradition of oral literature. For centuries, poems were memorised and sung, rather than recorded on paper. In a nomadic culture, paddling between hunting grounds, why weigh your kayak down with books?
Even today, Greenlanders seem to set little store on written records. I was eager to write about the diminishing ice that cut Upernavik off from the rest of the world - after all, I'd travelled miles from home in treacherous conditions to do so - but Beathe made it clear that she thought socialising was more important than scribbling.
She determined to teach me Greenlandic so I could converse with the islanders, and began with the word she claimed I would need most. "I love you", she said. "Asavakkit. This is the most important!" she added, and smiled.
After this simple beginning, my lessons became more complicated. Greenlandic is a daunting language, in which single words express concepts that other languages tiptoe around with whole phrases. I discovered that on waking up in the morning I could shout "Nuannarpoq" rather than "I am full of a delirious joy in being alive".
I began to parse the strange new Arctic landscapes word by word. I learnt how to say "the sea rises and falls slowly at the foot of the iceberg" (iimisaarpoq) and "the air is clear, so sounds can be heard from afar" (imingnarpoq).
Hungry for more vocabulary, I found a nineteeth-century dictionary among the journals of marine biology in the museum. Its bowdlerised English definitions were almost as puzzling as the original Greenlandic. The margins were filled with corrections in a copperplate hand that implied that the original compiler had been just as fallible as me.
I looked up from my study of incomprehensibly long Greenlandic words and watched icebergs drifting on the horizon. The peaks and tables looked like arcane writing, a sonograph of the subtle phonemes I was learning. Could topography provide a typography in a culture so resistant to letters?
Greenlandic has become infamous for its many words for snow. Yet snow is just the beginning - it has a wide vocabulary for most environmental conditions and is now acknowledged to be of fundamental importance in understanding Arctic ecology. Each word, like a time capsule, contains precise inherited knowledge that can help climate scientists to chart the nuances of the ice.
But the Greenlandic language is as vulnerable as the environment it describes. Since 2009, UNESCO's World Atlas of Languages in Danger has designated West Greenlandic 'vulnerable' and predicted that Avanersuaq and Tunumiit oraasiat, the North and East Greenlandic dialects, will disappear within a century. (Qavak, a South Greenlandic dialect, is already extinct.) What hope has the landscape, if the language that describes it disappears?
I had hoped to find poems in the Arctic. I did not expect to return with a whole new language. Greenlandic had become the key to representing the Arctic for me, and I felt I owed it an acknowledgement. I selected the twelve most evocative words that Beathe had taught me, and compiled my own abecedarium. This one is firmly anchored on paper, rather than sung, in the hope that a fragment of this poetic language will be preserved in a safe place, where other people can find it.
Exhibition details:
Nancy CampbellHow To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet opened at Bookartbookshop on 17 November and will run until 29 November. An artist's edition is available, details at www.nancycampbell.co.uk]]>
