2009

SYMPOSIUM

LAND WATER

AND THE VISUAL ARTS

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LAND / WATER

AND THE VISUAL ARTS

Land/Water consists of artists, writers and curators who embrace a diversity of creative and critical practices. As a research group it operates as a forum for interrogation of nature and culture, aesthetics and representation. Questioning imagery and practices relating to land, landscape and place is central to our ethos. As artists, writers, curators we work individually exploring space and place as a point of departure for experimenting in new modes of communication through picturing. We generate work that addresses a range of issues. These include environmental change, sustainability, journey, site and regional specificity.

In addition a forum for theoretical and methodological debate is constructed through research events, exchange exhibitions (with other HE Institutions), conferences, symposia and publications.

www.landwater-research.co.uk

Cover Image

Vicky Long

Design

Daniel Jones

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Liz Wells .......................................................

Introduction — (coming soon)

Anne Burke ...................................................

Am I believing what I’m seeing?: myth and materiality in sea voyage

Neville Gabie ...................................................

Landscape and Expedition: Antartica

Martin Shaw .................................................

Land/Water symposium 2009

Vicky Long ...................................................

Cape Farewell

Jorma Puranen ..............................................

Narrating the North

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16

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ANNE BURKE

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/ Am I believing what I’m seeing?: 1

myth and materiality in sea voyage

We’d been rowing for five or six hours. It was one of those hot, still days; the mast was up but not enough wind for the sail. We had set out that morning from Glen Columbkille, Co. Donegal, making our way north. Even just a couple of miles off the coast the sight of another boat, any boat, served to punctuate the space of the sea, providing some transitory reference point for the eye and mind to wander over. It looked like another curach out there, the boat we could see, but we couldn’t be sure: this wasn’t curach land, after all – not this particular stretch of the coast.

There were four of us. We were on our way to Iona. Eventually. We had planned the trip in two stages: this one, the first, took us over the month of June 2007 from Rosses Point, Sligo, to Rathlin Island, mid-way between the coasts of Scotland and Northern Ireland; the second leg, originally scheduled for the following June, was to take us from Rathlin to Iona, but in the event still remains pending. The journey was set up as a collaborative art project2 – a form of slow, working travel, carried out in a particularly elegant example of the Irish curach, the 4-seater Kerry naomhóg, built specifically for this trip3. Three of us were making the full journey and we were joined in turn by a series of ‘visiting’ rower-artists, each staying for a few days at a time.4

Rowing by curach, then, it is not so surprising to have recognised another curach at sea: and after the initial hesitation, as the distance between us and this second boat began to exponentially shrink, there was less and less to suggest that this was not indeed a curach, speeding towards us now, outboard motor at full throttle. Spinning round us as it reached us, practically skidding to a halt, the first words we heard over the noise of the engine were: “Am I believing what I’m seeing?” followed shortly by “Oh Jesus its real canvas too”. Quite apart from mirroring our own doubts, the incredulity

1 John Kilbane, recorded by Danny Sheehy

2 The voyage was supported through funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Iomert Columchille

3 Holger Lönze built this naomhóg over a two year period, in Ballyhaise, Co. Cavan

4 The full crew were Danny Sheehy (Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry), Holger Lönze (Ballydehob, Co. Cork) and Anne Burke (London); visiting crew were Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh (Dublin), Brendan Begley (Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry), David Burke, (Banbury) and Donal Mac Polin, (Moville, Co. Donegal).

and wonder, almost, in John Kilbane’s greeting points to a number of interesting points. To begin with, the shared questioning of what the eye could see was due to both boats being out of place along that particular stretch of the Donegal coast: us with our distinctive Kerry naomhóg visibly fitted out for a long journey, including mast and the supplies and provisions packed into the hold; and Kilbane with his equally displaced native Achill curach, from the Mayo coast. The mutual recognition of sameness, then – another curach – was swiftly followed up by the differences between us: real canvas in our case, contrasting with the fibre glassed hull of his, as consistent with more recent developments in fishing curach design. What his reference to ‘real canvas’ also hints at, however, is a further difference in terms of authenticity, or closeness to the ‘real thing’. Not only did Kilbane wholeheartedly support what we were doing – he literally tipped a bucket-load of freshly caught crabs onto the floor of our curach for our tea before towing us half way across the Gweebarra Bay – but his response accentuates the extent to which our choice of vessel led us into a terrain, a field of perception, already populated by the collective imagination. Beyond our personal or artistic desires connected with this voyage, what we were doing had specific cultural resonances and the journey itself functioned, in this sense, as a performance.

As far as the connotations of the curach are concerned, then, it is understood in anthropological terms as a material survival of the past, descending from what is thought to be one of Ireland’s earliest boat types. A west coast phenomena (apart from the River0 Boyne curach which is also the only extant example from inland waters), the curach plays a significant role within the symbolism of Irish national identity, often bordering on the clichéd in popular post-card terms. What this tends to conceal, however, is its efficiency as a highly manoeuvrable fishing boat, capable of carrying great weights and continuing to adapt in design terms to both the differing conditions of the Atlantic coast and the uses to which it is put.5 As well as regional variations, such as the distinctive hazel frame of the two-hander Dunfanaghy curach in the north of Donegal or the high prowed Aran Island curach fit for more exposed seas, within these broad types there are also many

5 For a comprehensive analysis of the Irish curach tradition see Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh (ed.) Traditional Boats of Ireland: History, Folklore and Construction, (The Collins Press, Cork, 2008) pp 417-557

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local variations, adapted to the particularities of the coastline. Relatively cheap and sustainable to produce, the curach is a light, keel-less boat, constructed from a wooden lattice frame that sits tight within a canvas skin, waterproofed with coal tar. As mentioned above, active fishing boats today generally opt for a fibreglass exterior, instead of the canvas covering, itself a 19th century adaptation of the original hide skin. Although not a consistent feature, the addition of a lugsail is present in some models and the use of outboard motors has become increasingly common, either attached to the transom or sunk within an engine well. Aesthetically, the proportions of the curach correspond to that of the golden section6 making it pleasing to the eye both rowed and under sail, while the craftsmanship of particularly well built models – often recognisably the work of a known maker – gives them a distinct appeal as objects in themselves. Our use of the curach for this journey is part of a wider movement concerned with its continuing evolution as a sustainable pleasure craft: there are now specifically designed racing curachs used competitively in the annual regattas along the coast and several community based groups are active in ensuring a continuity of locally held boat building skills.7

In addition to its past economic centrality to island and coastal life along the west, larger variations of the skin boat hold a place in the collective imagination in connection with both the Christianising missions of early Irish monks and with the more mythical, ancient saga or immram, dealing with a spiritual or metaphorical journey by sea to the Otherworld8. Literally meaning ‘rowing about’ and directly implicating the larger sea-going curach,9 the immram are rooted in the pagan tradition but function also as a way of intentionally accounting for the time before Christianity was introduced to Ireland. That larger curachs were used for long sea voyages has further been sustained through both archaeological findings as well as through more recent experimentation. Dating from the first century B.C., the Broighter boat model, made of sheet gold and found in a hoard in 1895 along with other gold objects in a field

6 Holger Lönze, 2003, The Golden Section in Irish Currachs: An Analysis of the Proportions of Dunfanaghy Currachs, available at http://loughneaghboats.org/curachs.html#Dunfanaghy; (18/02/10)

7 See Meitheal Mara - http://www.mmara.ie/; West Clare Currachs - http://www.westclarecurrachs.com/; Lough Neagh Boats - http://www.loughneaghboats.org

8 Mac Cárthaigh, op. cit., pp. 419-427

9 See for example, Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt (ed. and tr.), The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living (London, D.Nutt, 1895)

in Co. Derry, displays recognisable continuities with the larger skin boat, particularly with reference to its form and its mast and oar fittings.10 The religious fervour of sixth century Irish monks is associated with long sea voyages, such as that made by St Brendan, which may have taken him as far as Iceland.11 Tim Severin tested the feasibility of this in the Brendan Voyage, an expedition he led in 1976/77 using a traditionally constructed sea-going curach to journey from Brandon Creek on the Dingle Peninsula, Co. Kerry to Newfoundland, via Iceland.12 Although we used a conventional fishing curach, rather than a larger sea-going model, our choice of route likewise referenced that used by the 6th century Irish monk St Colum Cille (Columba), who travelled north to Iona, and beyond that to Iceland, following his departure from Ireland in 563. An extremely devout man, credited with the introduction of Christianity to Scotland, early records of his life have merged over time with myth and legend, giving rise to his departure being associated in popular memory with the part he played in the Battle of the Book, sparked off by his said refusal to accept the ruling of High King Diarmaid Mac Cearrbhevil following Colm Cille’s illicit copying of the gospels from the scholar St Finnian of MaighBhile. In the earliest precedent of copyright law in Ireland, the High King famously ruled “to every cow her calf and to every book its copy” before being defeated in the battle which ensued, instigated by Colm Cille in revenge. While scholars have not found direct evidence to support this reading of his departure, what is of interest is the multilayered nature of how his life is understood, supported both by written accounts of his life from the 7th, 9th and 16th centuries13 as well as by what is still very much alive in lore and the oral tradition.

10 Mac Cárthaigh, op. cit.,, p. 421

11 ibid, p. 422

12 ibid.

13 The 7th century Abbot Cuimíne Ailbhe wrote a short account of his life, which was subsequently incorporated along with details of his clairvoyance and miracle-making into a fuller work, the Vitae Columbae, by the 9th century Abbot Adhamhnán. The later 1562 text, the Beatha Colum Chille by the scholar Mánus Ó Dónaill, also incorporated lore and oral tradition current at the time of writing. See Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, The Lore of Ireland, An Encyclopaedia of Myth, Legend and Romance (The Collins Press, Cork, 2006)

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Anne Burke10

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As Kilbane’s greeting suggests, then, it is easy to see how our very presence in the water could tap into the collective imagination on a number of fronts, the curach functioning as both material and symbolic signifier of an authentically Irish tradition, with its apparent fragility also adding to the appeal of sea voyage as adventure per se. The performative aspect of our journey within a wider cultural terrain informed, in turn, the way each of our work evolved.14 Coupled with the disorientation of the senses that sea travel involves, it became for me a space to think with, feeding into ideas that would not necessarily find full resolution in the context of this voyage, given both the actual conditions of rowing at sea as well as the nature of art practice itself.

One of the themes I had envisaged exploring in photographic terms was directly informed my prior familiarity with the ancient Irish saga known as the Immram Brain – the Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living – pieced together in its current written form from seven partially existing manuscripts, the earliest dating from 1100 AD and the others from between the 14th and 16th centuries.15 Again there is this layering of the text, as with the case of St Colm Cille, pointing to the persistence of ideas that continue to both shape and be shaped over time and suggestive at the same time of a certain fluidity, itself reminiscent of the sea. In this account, we are told of an oracle – a woman – who appears to Bran carrying a flowering bough of an apple tree and who bids him to travel the sea to look for Emain, the land of women. The next morning he sets off with a band of 27 men, nine in each of three curachs, or coracles, as they are referred to in the text. They meet first of all Manannán son of Lir, a figure known as the ruler of the sea who reveals his greater knowledge of the same through his use of visual land-based metaphors to describe the sea:

What is a clear sea For the prowed skiff in which Bran is,

That is a happy plain with profusion of f lowers To me from the chariot of two wheels.

Bran sees The number of waves beating across the clear sea:

I myself see in Mag MonRed-headed f lowers without fault 16

14 Some reference is given to this in Anne Burke & Holger Lönze, Turas Cholmchille: Bound for Iona (http://www.loughneaghboats.org/turascholmcille.html, November 2007)

15 Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt op. cit., ‘Introduction’

16 ibid., verses 34 & 35

Going on their way again they come across an island, known as the Land of Joy, and all the people come and gape at them, laughing all the while. Bran drops one man off on to the Island who instantly becomes like them, reduced to laughing and gawking. Not long after that they reach the Land of Women, and Bran and his curach are pulled ashore by a woman who throws him a ball of thread that claves to his palm. They are taken to a large house where there is a bed for each couple and where food is endlessly plentiful – we are told that “no savour is wanting to them” and that “it seemed a year to them that they had been there”.17

Eventually one of the men, Nechtan, son of Collbran, grows homesick. The women urge them not to leave and that whatever they do they should not set foot on Ireland. When they reach the shore, a crowd has gathered and they ask who they are, to which Bran replies that he is Bran the son of Febal. The crowd know nothing of him although they remember the name from ancient stories. Nechtan, the homesick, jumps ashore and immediately turns to dust as if he had been in the earth for many hundreds of years. Bran tells the crowd his story, then writes his immram in Ogham – an early Irish script of lines and dots inscribed in stone - which he leaves with the people before bidding them farewell, never to be seen again.

What I was keen to explore photographically was the space of this meeting point, both with other travellers at sea and with people on land, particularly around the pivotal point of the landing place, whether beach or pier. I was interested in the fixity of the observer, already mesmerized by the magnetic pull of the sea, as Herman Melville describes in the opening passages of Moby Dick:

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? -- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.18

Further compelled to observe the events unfolding before their eyes - from the sight of this culturally laden boat drawing closer to land, to the intricacies of our landing manoeuvres – the observer appeared to

17 Ibid., verse 63

18 Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Toronto: Bantam Classics, 1981) pp17-18

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be transfixed, the stillness of the body colluding with the intensity of the experience as a sight, as primarily involving the activity of the eyes. Arrested in time and space the body is motionless, but not inert; only once the landing was complete and there was nothing more to captivate the eyes did it appear to once again relax its composure. There were certain echoes for me here with the way the body holds itself for the camera, particularly in the long exposures of early photographic portraiture or in ethnographic imagery concerned less with the portrait of an individual than with the delineation of type. In addition to photographing people watching us from the piers as we drew in to land or set off to sea again, I was interested in exploring the intensity of that look, so I began a series of long exposure full-figure portraits, using a 5x4 pinhole camera.

My own experience of being at sea and of thinking these ideas though, allowed me to identify in different ways with the Bran tale; there were certain continuities, for example in the crowd gathering to meet Bran and Nechtan as they pulled ashore and the way that we ourselves were received. What also resonated for me in the ending of that tale was precisely Bran’s remaining in a transient position, not stepping ashore like Nechtan lest the passing of time be made similarly manifest, in the form of his body turning to dust. As a narrative structure it serves a particular function, providing a way to account for the passing of time, to literally bring the past into the present. Bran’s positioning on the sea side of the shore, however, also allows for this temporal connection to be part of a wider metaphorical separation between land and sea, so that not only do these operate as distinct places spatially, but they also allow for an embodiment of different concepts of time. The coast or shoreline, in this sense, acts as a spatial or geological marker as well as a temporal marker, with the unfathomable depths of the sea allowing it to operate beyond the construct of time. Bran as voyager/storyteller is central to this distinction, his very transience allowing for that gap to be bridged, but only momentarily so.

The connection between time and space that is explored in the immram is also a central component in the concept of journey itself, at least in the etymology of the English word, which while referring broadly to “distance travelled within a specified time”, contains in its Old French and Latin roots specific reference to the day, with jornee, meaning a days work or travel,

and diurnata or diurnus meaning day, daily.19 In being quite literally about time and space then, the idea of journey carries an immediate conceptual link to the daily rhythm and movement of the planets. The choice of vessel for our journey reinforced that connection in quite primal terms, dependent as we were on either the help or hindrance of the wind20 but also, more emphatically, on the rhythm of the tides, particularly where these enter into competition with coastal swells around headlands; as in the case of Malin Head, for example, where the colliding currents of the Gulf Stream and Irish Sea required particular negotiation. Aside from the elements, we were primarily dependent on our own bodies, on the rhythm and coordination of our collective rowing power.

If the figure of Bran somehow embodies a different temporal and spatial awareness, this in itself is a central element of the experience of being at sea. Travelling the coast one’s sense of land changes. Even as we passed or arrived in places I had visited by land, they were no longer defined by their spatial relationship to other inland towns or the transport routes that join them. Indeed it was as if they were entirely separate places, as if this new knowledge cancelled out any prior experience I had of them. The coast in this sense was no longer the edge of a land mass made familiar through the visual device of a map, but became shaped by our perspective of it from the sea, with this varying also according to how far out to sea we were. Even against the sea charts delineating the trajectory of the coast, it was difficult to read the land, to get a sense of the distance between headlands or of the relative positioning in space of back and foreground as we made our course. Fishermen get round this using the relationship between recognisable markers as a way of guiding themselves ashore, visually aligning themselves first to one then another. Clearly this is something that one learns, that comes with familiarity of a stretch of coastline, but even with this, the literal fluidity of the sea has a displacing effect.

In the absence of a literal path to follow, given the nature of sea travel, and, by extension of the traceless path we carved, there is a sense in which the cultural connotations of the curach kept us grounded, mapping our performance according to a series of historical and mythical reference

19 “Journey”, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Seventh Edition, Oxford University Press, 1982.

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points, that functioned almost as counterpoints to the disorientation of the senses referred to above. As we moved along our route, I became conscious, from the stories shared with us along the way, of the existence of a distinctive maritime or coastal community of which we, as passers through, became a crucial and formative part. Benjamin identifies the resident tiller of the soil and the trading seaman as the archetypes of the two kinds of storytellers whose stories people are equally interested in hearing – those who stay at home and know the local lore and traditions and those that come from afar.21 It seemed that we had somehow tapped into a cultural trade route allowing for this exchange in a way that may not be much in practice today. As sea travellers passing through it felt like we had a role in turn in reinforcing a collective consciousness of a wider coastal community, in keeping open the channels of communication between places identified at least in part by the traffic of the sea.

There were people we heard stories of independently in different locations and our passage between them served as conduit for keeping the connections active. Some such stories focused, unsurprisingly, on the danger of the sea: on the island of Owey we had tea in a house once belonging to John Ogilvey, a man who died in a tragic accident at sea; we heard about him also in Downings further up the coast and were able to add what we knew into the account. Given the danger of the sea there is a very real sense of the need for protection from it; indeed an obligatory feature of the curach is a bottle of holy water attached somewhere to its frame. The water is not to bless the occupants of the curach, but the sea itself: in times of danger the bottle is broken and the water thrown onto the sea to cancel out its potential for danger.

In Downings in the North West corner of Donegal we were given another form of protection, a tiny piece of clay from Gartan, the birthplace of St Colm Cille, identified with the route to Iona that we were following. Story has it that before he was born, an angel called for a flagstone floating on a lake to be brought to his mother, who gave birth on it, staining the earth all around with the birth blood. Colm Cille’s travels by sea have undoubtedly further influenced the place of water in popular lore and mythology concerning him. Water

21 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Arendt, Hannah (ed.) Illuminations (Schocken Books, New York, 1968) pp84-85

is held for example as not damaging objects he once touched, such as his books, which in turn are associated with having curative properties themselves; even curing sick cows brought in contact with them. Similarly, the land stained by Colm Cille’s birth blood has acquired an agency of its own, attributing it with curative properties and capable, specifically, of protecting those at sea. I kept the piece of Gartan clay in my pocket for the rest of the journey, along with another personal talisman had I brought with me, both of which now sit on my desk where I write. Measuring less than two inches in length and just a couple of millimetres deep, the clay itself is not visible, wrapped as it is in paper and then a more plastic covering, on which the words GARTAN CLAY are written in black felt-tip. It is a little more worn at the edges now than when it was given to us, but looked at closely the covering itself can be seen to still bear the traces of printed instructions for some form of lottery game. As I hold this tiny multilayered text and cultural artefact up to my ear, to better listen to its history that spans a period of almost 1,500 years, it seems to me that there are certain parallels between its symbolic functions and those of the curach, both bound into the psyche by the intertwined threads of myth and materiality, both embodying the mysterious fluidity of the sea.

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/ Bibliography

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Arendt, Hannah (ed.) Illuminations (Schocken Books, New York, 1968)

Anne Burke & Holger Lönze, Turas Cholmchille: Bound for Iona - (http://www.loughneaghboats.org/turascholmcille.html, November 2007) 22/02/10

Holger Lönze, 2003, The Golden Section in Irish Currachs: An Analysis of the Proportions of Dunfanaghy Currachs

Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh (ed.) Traditional Boats of Ireland: History, Folklore and Construction, (The Collins Press, Cork, 2008)

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Toronto: Bantam Classics, 1981)

Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, The Lore of Ireland, An Encyclopaedia of Myth, Legend and Romance (The Collins Press, Cork, 2006)

Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt (ed. and tr.), The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living (London, D.Nutt, 1895)

/ Acknowledgements

Thanks to all my fellow crew members for the opportunity of sharing the incredible experience of this journey with them, to Danny Sheehy for sharing his records of the journey with me as I prepared for this paper and to David Treece and Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh for their comments on it. Thanks also to Liz Wells and Heidi Morstang for inviting me to take part in the University of Plymouth’s 2009 Land/Water symposium, ‘Landscape and Expedition’.

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NEVILLE GABIE

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/ Landscape and Expedition – Antartica

Perhaps with the exception of the Apollo Moon landings, no other single destination captured the public imagination more than the South Pole expeditions initiated one hundred years ago. In part this owes something to the failed heroics of Scott and Shackleton in pushing the boundaries of the known world. However it was the first expedition to be captured on film - photography bringing it to a readily receptive audience. Scott’s failure in his race to the pole heralded the end of the heroic age of exploration, denting the aspirations of Empire. But the photographs, particularly of Frank Hurley and his silent film ‘South’ made while accompanying Shackleton to Antarctica, revealed the drama of this undiscovered continent to a mass audience for the very first time. They continue to remain iconic. The world’s attention is still captivated by Antarctica and now it seems to be the one continent with the potential to unlock our fragile relationship to the planet itself.

18th Dec 2008

Dear Joan, starting my journey to Antarctica from South Africa, the country of my birth and youth, seems so perfectly appropriate. Stepping off the plane in Cape Town my whole body ached with longing. The smell of the air, peoples faces, the light, the last flowers of a Jacaranda, a bare patch of dusty ground, the sound of a voice – England has given me shelter but my whole being knows when I am home.

But what exactly is the role of an artist travelling with contemporary expeditions when every aspect of our planet, no matter how hostile or remote, has been televised and brought to the comfort of our own living rooms? And at a time when the very notion of travel is increasingly considered taboo, what was my reason for wanting to make the journey South? Do you mean taboo of expeditions to fragile environments such as the Antarctica?

27th Dec 2008

Dear Joan, being so far away and really on the edge of anything I have ever experienced, my thoughts keep leaping wildly and it feels that a few words on a page is just not adequate. Today is Christmas on the ship now that the storms are past. Through the porthole the sea and sky have the colour and weight of lead and periodically blizzards of snow engulf us. Words like ‘vast’ or ‘awesome’ or ‘profound’ are completely inadequate to describe the desolation out there. We still have hundreds of miles to travel but what is clear is that we have entered a space [place] where the force of nature and not man is firmly in control.

Over the last few days I have been thinking about the title of this symposium – Landscape and Expedition and what it means to me. Explorers go on expeditions and whilst it may seem simplistic art only has value personally if it’s about a process of discovery. Regardless if it happens within the

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confines of a studio, the back garden, the street outside my front door, embarking on a piece of work is about making a journey of discovery where the answers are only revealed through an unfolding process of engagement. So finding a reason to make worthwhile work is not dependant on exotic travel, in fact in some cases the exoticism can be more problematic then helpful. Going to Antarctica with BAS (British Antarctic Survey) I was clearly embedded in an expedition team although these days it has more to do with furthering science then territory. But before I discuss what I see as the relevance of artists travelling with scientists to Antarctica and elsewhere, it is important to outline my concerns and practice and what brought me to the point of making an application to BAS [British Antarctic Survey]

30TH DEC 2008

Dear Joan, gradually as my eyes adjusted I began to discern the faintest smudge of grey beginning to emerge from an absolutely white background. Over several minutes it grew clearer until I could make out sharp edges and the sloping curve, darker but only fractionally then all around. As we silently got nearer the most enormous iceberg with a crystalline cliff face and soft snow covered top loomed over me. Imagine a drawing of almost no tone, no colour, almost no line but still sharp. A drawing of nothing apparently substantial but which has an awesome presence and physicality. Somehow the less there is, no sun to create shadow and reveal form, no picturesque shapes in the ice; the less information there is the more of what ‘is’ reveals itself.

Although I studied Sculpture at the Royal College I work in a range of media from film and photography to the construction of objects using all sorts of materials. I have no particular loyalty to my means of engagement but what is absolutely central to all my work is that it is made in direct response to particular non-studio situations or locations. I am interested in making work which grows out of a direct, sometimes long-term engagement with locations in a state of physical, political or social flux. Usually the contexts I work in are urban: five years working and co-curating a project which involved 25 artists and writers resident in a tower block due for demolition in North Liverpool*, or three years working as artist in residence on a huge city centre development site in

Bristol** Sometimes the locations are rural and remote. ‘Coast’† for example was a two year project developed in response to the islands and mud flats at the top of the Thames estuary historically used by the MOD as a nuclear, now simply ballistics testing site. But the particular project that had a direct relationship with my desire to go to Antarctica was a three-month residency in a remote town between wheatbelt and desert in Western Australia.‡ In each case I work with whatever medium seems best suited to the situation, the work being as much about the community of people as it is the physical context.

3rd Jan 2009

Dear Joan, Even in this extraordinary place we began our first few days off the ship with the most ordinary tasks. Everyone has to help with ‘relief ’ moving all the food, clothes, personal items, machinery, fuel – lots of it, spare-parts, wood, electrical goods, and every other assortment of goods needed to keep the base going for a full year. The ship is about ten miles away – a journey of about 40 minutes. The whole thing is run like a military operation that lasts several days in two shifts – day 8am–8pm and night 8pm–8am. Because of the daylight you cannot tell which is which.

What is also beginning to become very much more visible is everyone’s role and the pecking order or groups that go hand in hand with human nature. As you can imagine even in a small group of 43 there is every conceivable personality and each person’s reason for being here is so different. Kellerberrin is a dying town, population 600, stranded on the Great Eastern Highway three hours drive inland from Perth WA. It is a flat, fragile landscape of wheat interspersed with huge tracts of saltpans, the devastating result of clearing the natural bush. A few hours further along the road is Kalgoolie. Once a gold-rush town, the landscape is dominated by the biggest open–cast goldmine in Australia, surrounded by the toxic spoil and chemical lakes of the extraction process.

This is a desert landscape and although the populations are tiny the impact of human activity is visible and evident. In fact it is an irony of deserts that people-less landscapes often betray the first signs of detrimental human impact: Antarctica is no different in that respect.

Whilst Scott was actively planning his expedition intending to be the first to reach the South Pole, white settlers, pushing inexorably inland, were clearing the

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bush and native population from around Kellerberrin and ‘opening up’ the country.

4TH JAN 2009 Dear Joan, Over the last few days it has struck me very clearly that everyone is looking for ‘something’ to photograph – penguins, seals, whales, a spectacular iceberg, parts of the ship, the base, each other, something to focus on worth seeing. Just how many photographs of penguins have been taken in the last few days hardly bears thinking about except it raises the question, why? The experience outside is of nothingness, not even a visible horizon. It has made me want to see if I can photograph nothing. I don’t mean not take photographs but to see how little it is possible to reduce an image to. I want to see if I can take a photograph without a specific point of focus; a carefully framed image of landscape and sky which is devoid of colour, horizon and with no particular reference. This so far has been my experience. An unrelenting emptiness that seems to act like a mirror for the only thing in it – myself.

There are many comparisons to be drawn between Western Australia and Antarctica as flat desert landscapes with low precipitation. But there are equally stark contrasts. Rising out of the Australian Desert appear the most enormous boulders, mountains in fact of dense, weatherworn, impenetrable, almost black granite. Whilst in the frozen oceans around Antarctica rock is replaced by huge Tabular Icebergs of a scale which is overwhelming but whose substance is ultimately no more solid then a glass of water. In one landscape, exploitation of natural resources has pushed it to its limits. By contrast any form of mineral extraction is banned under the terms of the Antarctic treaty and as long as the treaty lasts, it protects every aspect of life and work in the continent. But perhaps the most significant difference is the inhabitants. Whilst there has been an established population in Western Australia going back centuries, Antarctica has not until very recently, had any year round residents. Even now what exists are the temporary bunkrooms on bases contrived to support a handful of people during a fifteen month working contract.

As an outsider in Kellerberrin I was keen to understand the attitudes and relationship to this particular landscape expressed by the people who relied on it for their livelihood; an aboriginal elder, a wheat farmer and a geologist working in the goldfields. Interestingly all three expressed a passion and love for the landscape that

challenged my preconceptions, the point I suppose of responding to what you find and not what you imagine.

10TH JAN 2009

Dear Joan, imagine a landscape with absolutely no colour other then the muted tones in the sky. No earth or vegetation, no rocks or leaves. A place where anything of colour is artificial and man-made. I was chatting with one of the team today whose job involves moving the containers and equipment annually to avoid it being buried. We were talking about the new Halley 6 base that is being built just next to our base. It is designed as several modular structures each on skis allowing it to be moved. Although the modules are blue the skis which sit on the ice are white and with very good reason. An object of any colour, which does not reflect the summer sun, absorbs warmth from its rays and as a result melts the snow around causing it to sink. If the skis were any other colour they would literally burn a hole into the snow and bury themselves. At Art College we were taught about cold and warm colours, how they affect us visually and psychologically. But here it seems any colour is an unnatural phenomena and all colour, which does not reflect the sunlight, is actually warm. Imagine colour as an impostor, as something negative and perhaps even harmful.

Much of the work I did in Australia involved working closely with local residents. I also began filming the landscape from the air, attaching a video camera to the underside of a kite. I was fascinated by the physicality of flying a kite and how it immediately draws you into an engagement with your surroundings as a participant, a dancer in the heat, dust rocks, and shrubs, completely dependant on the wind above. The kite has four strings of fixed length, which I manipulate pulling with one hand or the other. I can guide it through the air over the surface of the land just as I might a pencil on a sheet of paper. The all-consuming rhythm, the interdependence on natural forces, I found has many parallels to both drawing and sculpture.

15TH JAN 2009

Dear Joan, How do you record silence? This morning when I got up the whole sky was clear and perfectly blue. The temperature outside was minus 10 but with just about enough wind to fly my kite. Once I signed out, got a radio and kite I walked about two kilometres from the base towards the perimeter. I could not hear a sound – I mean nothing. Because we are inland there are almost no birds – it’s several days since I last saw one

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and then it was just a lone skewer, which vanished as quickly as it had come. Of course there are no animals but at that distance there was not even a sound from the base although I could still see it standing proud of the landscape on its stilts. It is difficult for me to describe but I have never experienced a silence so intense. The only sound, the squeaking of my boots on snow and those of my own breathing. Somehow the experience of standing out here made my whole chest feel constricted as if being squeezed by an enormous belt and I could feel the tears welling up inside me. How do you capture that? I cannot think how to photograph and film something so emotive, so personal. What I do know is just how aware of yourself standing in this landscape makes you feel.

My application to go to Antarctica was to fly kites. Of all recreations it seems the most frivolous, light-hearted and reminiscent of warm summer evenings. The antithesis of everything I could expect South. I liked the idea of making an expedition, of travelling around the world with some of the most eminent scientists embarked on a mission to play.

I proposed travelling to Halley 5 Research Station, the most Southern base run by BAS. Built on the Brunt ice shelf in the Weddell Sea, this base is the fifth, the others having long disappeared out to sea. The whole shelf is moving at a rate of two metres a day towards the coast and at a certain point the end breaks off naturally to form an iceberg. With water beneath the shelf it also rises and falls with the tidal swell, although not noticeably. Previously BAS have not allowed artists to stay at Halley because of its remoteness, however I was determined to go there if at all possible. Unlike the main BAS base Rothera, located on the Antarctic Peninsular and surrounded by the most spectacular scenery, Halley is in a flat white desert of ice. Deliberately I wanted to avoid the immediately beautiful, scared that I might easily be seduced by the obvious. I was looking for the blank white canvas where on a cloudy day no distinction can be made between ground and sky. Antarctica as I imagined it to be.As the sole artist in a group totalling 40 you need a degree of objectivity between your own practice and what is going on all around. Whilst I could not compete or claim to understand the complexity of scientific experiments, flying a kite gave me a pretext to travel, talk to and observe.

27TH JAN 2009

Dear Joan… Last night I took out my kite. The sun as usual was still bright and high in the sky, the wind seven knots and blowing directly from the West. It was cold, about minus 7 but perfect for flying. Amazingly, within half an hour the wind swung through 180 degrees and was suddenly coming directly from the East and with equal force. The temperature dropped to minus 17 and a bright mist appeared in moments. Then a very strange thing, Diamond Dust filled the sky. Very thin slithers of ice blowing and floating through the air and reflecting the light like its description, a shower of vanishing diamonds.

During my stay I managed to fly my kite in several locations, accompanying scientists inland and on the coast as well as in several locations within the perimeter of the base. I was interested in recording from the air the ephemeral marks on the surface of the ice made both from base activity and natural forces. What is interesting was whether from an airplane at five thousand feet, my kite at fifty metres or simply looking at the ground where my feet stood, patterns created by the wind looked identical in scale. A visible example of fractal geometry.

But whilst flying kites was a means to an end I always had the intention of recording the whole journey from Cape-Town back to the Falklands. Just as in Australia I wanted to understand this community of people and their reasons for wanting to be here, sometimes leaving family behind for periods of fifteen months.

I wanted to give myself the freedom to respond to the experience without preconception. Throughout and from the moment the Shackleton dropped anchor in Cape Town Harbour I developed a series of filmed drawings. In each I drew the moving horizon-line using a marker pen on glass whilst filming. I wanted to capture, moment by moment, my own changing relationship to what I could see.

Much of my work involved digging blocks of ice. Using two video cameras set one hundred metres apart the work was based on digging, relocating and burying one cubic metre of ice. I became obsessed by the ritual of digging, of hard physical work with little visible result. Once the ice was relocated and buried, apart from the obvious disturbance of footprints there was on physical evidence left in the landscape. I waited for days of low contrast experimenting with a series of photographs

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reducing the image to almost nothing and with no reference to scale. I recorded hours of conversations with others on the base. But just what form the work will finally take is ongoing.

9TH FEB 2009

Dear Joan, you probably don’t remember, but an enduring recollection I have is of the first ever moon landing. With television banned in South Africa by the Nationalist party, our lives were dominated by the radio – Springbok Radio.

That day there were gatherings in suburban streets, groups clustered on steops, or in clipped fenced front gardens, radios talking, adults discussing in hushed tones while drinking and smoking. Us children running up and down playing games between parked cars in driveways aware we were witness to something

significant. I seem to remember everyone looking upwards waiting for Apollo to pas overhead. Now that appears fanciful but it’s how I picture the afternoon. If you don’t recall the day you will Neil Armstrong’s words ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ and the image of the flag being planted in front of the strange four legged landing capsule. Perhaps the same day in England was quite different; you might even have been at boarding school. In retrospect that event seemed to sum up an age, a particular decade, the value of the expedition being more symbolic then practical during the cold war.

The Halley base is equally strange on its legs, equally a product of science fiction, its location every bit as bereft of life or visual interest as the surface of the moon. Above the front entrance on a tall mast the Union Jack is being pulled about by the wind.

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What I am beginning to realise is just how unrealistic is the task of conveying to someone who has not experienced it, the vastness of the space outside. Or the silence on a day without any wind, no living thing in the sky above or in the ice beneath. There are lines of flags across the landscape, little black or red squares of cloth on bamboo canes part buried, some bent double, all shredded. Flags, which mark out safe routes and dangerous locations, others that are your only guide in the featureless landscape between distant sites. The little lines of bamboo look so pathetic, so completely insignificant stretching out a few miles into the distance over a continent. Their tenuousness a visual reminder of just how ephemeral our grasp of life is.

It is only a matter of weeks since my return from Antarctica and far too early in the process to examine the work objectively. The tapes and photographs are mostly still in boxes and as yet there are no dates or venues for an exhibition. So what are my conclusions? Of course it is easy to say that it is artists, writers and musicians that have historically documented our times, that they can make visible what is perhaps hidden. You could argue that it is often artists who challenge the broader perceptions or values of society through their work and in some instances that is true. For myself I would say that I deliberately chose to embed myself in places which are in a state of flux, the catalyst if you like in the midst of the situation.

13TH FEB 2009

Dear Joan, So much of the effort to keep a toe-hold in Antarctica revolves around a shovel. Digging is a daily activity from filling the melt-tank to clearing wind-tails opening up buried fuel dumps, lifting drum-lines, moving science equipment, burying battery boxes, even digging snow out of vehicles after a blow. Moving things is equally routine. Buildings, fuel, sledges, even the memorial need lifting and moving regularly to stop them from being buried in drifting ice.

This constant wrestling is maintained by spade-full, even if sometimes its on the front of a bulldozer. One winter, one storm and everything is back to square one. I was always drawn to the ephemeral marks in the landscape, things like the vehicle tracks but everything even the base itself is at best temporary. I have wanted to make some work about that, about digging and moving. Something that gives a sense of scale to the landscape in relation to human endeavour, work which explores the idea of routine and effort.

But there is something else I realised. In an age dominated by the discoveries of science, I was privileged to see some of it first hand but it was clear Antarctica is a continent whose secrets will never entirely be understood by science. The significance of places like Antarctica goes way beyond the mere mechanics, the nuts and bolts of how things work. And whilst science provides us with many solutions not all our aspirations desires or understanding of the world around us can be fulfilled by such a singular approach.

Experiences of these landscapes bring us face to face with what it means to be human. In one moment you can be blown away by your own insignificance, a speck on a continent, on a planet in a galaxy. And in the next you can be touched by the warmth and inter-dependence of just one other person digging snow for the melt tank.

Not only is it appropriate for artists, writers, musicians, to be included in these sorts of expeditions, it is imperative in an age looking for a broader understanding of our environment.

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/ Postscript

OCT 2009

Dear Joan, I thought the big adjustment of going to Antarctica would be the trip out, leaving you and our family behind. I was wrong. My difficulties began when I returned home. I felt bereft and found it hard to readjust to normality. I did not want to work, to be with people or in crowds. In a mere four months I had become institutionalised to a point where nothing made any sense. My only desire was to return.

Of course everyone wanted to know what it was like. But how can you describe the space and the silence where the uniform whiteness of land and sky is only interrupted by the intrusion of your own breathing. Standing in that emptiness was like examining myself in a mirror without distraction.

Of course lots of people go to Antarctica for season after season and I guess for most it is a place of work, a fantastic jolly and the trip of a lifetime. It is all that but it touched something so deep I am yet to fully understand why.

Would I go back? Given the chance, without any hesitation.

* Up in the air – Liverpool 2000/05 ** bs1- Cabot Circus – Bristol 2006/o9† Coast – Essex – 2003/05‡ Iaska – International Artspace Kellerberrin, Australia 2006

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MARTIN SHAW

/ Land Water Symposium 2009

This is fresh meat if nothing else; I was getting my daughter ready for her ballet class with one hand and thinking about this with the other. So the word expedition, that’s the first thing I wanted to talk about because I know how knackered I felt as soon as I thought about the word expedition. I like words like voyage, foray – which is a smaller thing, journey, hired venture, or even a quest. I actually looked for the etymology for the word expedition and it wasn’t wildly exciting but what it did mention consistently was groups, people, people going together on an expedition. I think one of the initial things I want to draw up is that my experience of working in wilderness settings. Is although it is with small groups of people ultimately I am preparing them to go out alone and normally that will involve them fasting for 4 days and nights completely alone. There is a mountain called Cadair Idris The Seat of Arthur. They say if you spend a night on the top of Cudair, you come back mad, dead or a poet. So we go up for 4 days and nights with out food to see if we can drink down the moon, to see what will happen. In that capacity I have worked with people that were dying, at risk teenagers, mercenaries, people coming back from war, lots of folks that just wanted to go out and have a visceral and a medial experience of the natural world. What I am involved in is in no way taking cultural symbols from other places, it’s not a want to be Native American thing. It’s simply the belief that it is a profound and good thing to leave society for periods of time and spend times in deep reflection in gorgeous wild places, and the belief that in actual fact they offer a kind of feral mirror to us.

The thing I want to talk about is the return, we have been talking about voyages and expeditions and actually the thing I am interested in is the complexity of the return, coming back, and how difficult it can be, in any profound experience, to integrate it. In the years I have been leading these retreats actually having a deep wild experience is not hard to have, it’s not something that is way back in time, you can have it right now. The complexity of it is coming back to a culture that may be has amnesia or maybe active hostility to that experience. So what happens is you could have spent 6 months in an Ashram you could be coming out of a divorce whatever it is that pulls you from the steady road pulls you from the tenured track you expected to be going along. I want to talk a little bit about that and then I want to tell a story. It is a story that is in direct, I enjoyed Ann’s talk

yesterday and there is thread of it. I want to tell a story about a woman in a skin boat which I will do. First of all I will start with two brief bits of poetry I like poetry because it moves my head from concentrating in one way and it lifts it and turns it around. Are you familiar with Rainer Maria Rilke? This is a voyaging poem. “Sometimes a man stands up during supper and goes outside and keeps on walking because there’s a church that stands somewhere in the east. His children say blessings over him as if he were dead, and another man dies there among the plates and the dishes so that his children have to go far out into the world to seek that church that he forgot.” Very Germanic.

So we immediately get a sense that all of us need part of the job of being a human being is that there is a church somewhere far to the east. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know what it looks like. But with Rilke you have a sense that everything has to fall away and you have to go for that thing.

Now I am a man that has a lot of time with his hands in the dishes and the plates and that’s OK. I have also been a man that has been out on lots of voyages as well. So that is one image of ‘leaving the village’ which is what I would call it. What I am interested in is what I call village knowledge and forest knowledge and some places where they meet. So the second poem is this by someone called Bill Holme. “Someone dancing in us learnt only a few steps, the ‘do your work’ waltz and the ‘what do you expect’ waltz in 4/4 time. No he hasn’t noticed yet the woman standing away from the lamp, the one with the dark eyes who knows the rumba and strange steps in jumpy rhythms from the mountains of Bulgaria. No if he dances with her something unexpected may happen and if he doesn’t you can expect the next world will look a lot like this one.” So we have to look for the woman with the dark eyes that stands away form the lamp. It’s an interesting image in a Gaelic and Celtic myth, they believe the soul of a man is female and the soul of a woman is male. Who knows but I think it is a lovely idea to play with. I think I spent most of my life looking for a woman with dark eyes standing away from the lamp. It was very useful when I realised she was probably lurking somewhere in my chest.

Part of my work with Wilderness involved living outside for 4 years. I lived in a large tent, a black tent with a wood burner in it and I travelled nomadically. It was because I wanted to have an experience of the wild.

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Some people say how can you have an experience in the wild living in Great Britain? Well I think you can and I would argue that point with anybody that wants to. I wanted an experience that was not as deep as the 4 days and nights fasting, I wanted to find some sort of middle ground. Now what I have found over the years is that when you come back from any deep experience like that as I said it’s difficult to articulate it. Often if you are in a room I talk about the little ‘I’ and the big ‘we’. When it’s I did this and I did that – you run the risk of that awful phrase being used when someone says “well I am so happy for you”. No that is just a dreadful moment it’s as if you see the words pirouetting out of your mouth and falling to the ground in front of the other person. This brings me back to Ann’s talk yesterday. The images of what was happening on the boat and on the shore and that liminal place between them. Again with the Celts they love beaches and they love harbours because they are betwixt and between neither one thing nor the other the dusk and the dawn. That cross roads point is primarily what my work is about and a lot of my work is again aimed on integrating experience back into the community that you come from if you come from some sort of community and what is community to begin with? I think two thirds of the community should exist in your imagination for a start because then you can have long dead poets and animals and other things coming in too.

But myth for me has proved the language of the return in a way. When I would talk about my experiences in nature, it would either attract or push people further away. But when I found I could talk in a story. If you say there was a King a Queen and deep forest we were all on board. We have all had deep experiences; we have all had profound moments. We have all been in the forest whether or not you have ever left Croyden, we have all had it. So myth for me became a way of putting my arm round a room and protecting the experiences I had had and the vulnerability of them, but also creating a place that was for all of us to find their way into. So that’s something that I will talk more about in a minute.

Is anyone familiar with this idea that was made popular by Joseph Campbell ‘The Heroes Journey’? I will briefly say what it is. What you find in many myths pan globally from all round the world is a certain motif a certain set of movements. What they are is normally the story will begin with a severance, think about Lord of the rings there’s the shire and something terrible happens and

normal people have to pull something magnificent out of themselves and they have to leave what is familiar.So we have got this first stage of severance. Secondly you have the ‘threshold’ which would be a set of challenges, moons, mystical experiences whatever it is but you would be far from what is familiar. In Africa they call it the world turned upside down. A key to knowing you are in an experience like that you have no idea when it is going to end.

The third stage is the return. That is when you come back whatever you had to wrestle, whatever you had to go further into, whatever part of your soul had to emerge, you bring it back. The idea is you are bringing it back to a community that are alert, aware and grateful of the experience that you just had. In some way you flesh out the life of the community with the vision you bring but the idea is that the vision is 3 fold, it’s triadic. That you need all 3 parts of it to fully live and to fully be seen in the world. There was a great book written by a guy called Nicholas Black Elk he wrote a book called ‘Black Elk speaks’. It is really worth reading. He was very emphatic that no matter what experiences we have you have to live it so the people can see. It has to have a performative element some how. It doesn’t mean you have to be a story teller, but there is something about the process of vision that requires living it in some way that it’s seen or felt or touched. I remember a guy called Someday used to say ‘does it grow corn?’ is what you are doing growing corn in the world? Can we eat it in some way?

So within what we call initiative practice within rights of passage It’s the same process, the leaving of what is familiar, going out into the wild space, the listening and receptivity of that, and then the return. But as I said at the beginning this has not been the going out but it’s been the coming back. So what to do, how do we come back? I’m talking about it specifically today within the context of both myth and rights of passage, but you will be able to find some point in your life that you remember doing that trip when he left or she left and how do we come back from those experiences. What are they about. The first thing I would say is this Geothe says ‘tell a wise person or else keep silent’. Keep silent is zip it. So when I work with people that have come out to the wild the first thing we do is they have one shot to talk about their experience with all the profundity and it’s spinning around in their head but after that for a year don’t say a word. You can write about it, you can turn it into some form of art, you

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can talk to me about it, you could talk to people that were there with you, but you don’t immediately make it public, because the idea is it not cooked, the meal is not cooked. I sometimes wonder that the years I spent living in the tent I wasn’t really cooked I was attempting to stay out there. One of the things that I feel passionately about, is don’t make a marginal life out of a marginal experience. There is a tendency to do that to retreat and to pull back so completely what you come back to feels so unattractive you don’t come back.

So what to do ‘tell a wise person or else keep silent’, secondly, do you know that image that you get in myths and fairy tales of people that disappear for one night as a fairy and they come back and seven years have passed. I have been thinking about the recently and I was thinking how when you commit to working your own life that is really edifying and really nourishing and really connected to what I would call the world. It often means a commitment to very long cycles of time because the world that you come back to is normally so rapid and so speedy and so fast, the things that you are trying to grow cannot work at that speed. So there has to be a commitment to a longer cycle of time in whatever it is that you are trying to articulate.

Another sweet thing is that the Siberians have 12 names for the moon, and they are gorgeous names and they are all connected to the deer- - stags, antlers, does, beautiful things. So go out and find something so lovely you want to give it 12 names. We have 12 names for coffee, 12 different types of divorce settlement, 12 types of duvet perhaps, but what you could you find or articulate that is so exquisite and so interesting and so multifaceted, you want to give it 12 different names. Also living of course in Britain we are a very cramped country so again you can fall under the illusion that unless you are out in the wilds of Alaska you are not connected to the wild. One of things I feel very clear on my work is less connected these days to the word wilderness and more to do with the word wildness and that is specifically because there is more mercury in it. It’s a more mercurial term and I am interested in wildness in language. I am interested in language that can have small animals living in it and ferreting about, which I think is why metaphor are important. I have been thinking as metaphor as magical practice as well. So thinking about our language, extended community, as I have said that is one of the things coming back from a period in the wild is the realisation that actually there could be one square foot of earth

and you want to have a relationship with that. I have got this tiny garden in Ashburton about the size of a postage stamp, but I can put my head to it and a lot goes on and a lot happens but it’s just bringing your vision into something terribly small and then amplifying it and writing about it.

What does myth say abut the return? I’m putting it into 3 categories today; it talks about death, shape shifting, and weddings. That is basically it. That’s what the myths say about the return. Death in the sense that you do not return from a deep experience in the way that you went out. That is hard fro your friends because they want you as you were, not as you are now. So there is a death and you only have to look at one of my favourite stories is about a woman who falls in love with a white bear playing with a golden wreath. It’s a Norwegian story and she goes off on the back of a white bear, but at a certain point she gets tipped off that bear and she is left in a deep forest for a very long time. She comes back different, she comes back changed, and she comes back with knowledge of the crone, and people don’t like it. She has a small blade in her garter if you get too cloin and she has crows that live in her hair. But that is an interesting image for me, it’s a nourishing image. The shape shifting comes in the same way. Many of you will be familiar with the shamanistic culture which is the idea of a death or dismemberment, the idea that the boy is torn into a new constellation. The retreats that I run in Snowdonia as well just to add to the 4 day and night fast on the last night you stay up all night in a small circle thinking, praying, whatever you want to call it but you do it, and something will happen in that night something profound shifts in the psyche and in the soul. You don’t come back the same.

There is a change of shape. I have just got back from America and culturally they seem to want a cultural change of shape at the moment. It is very interesting to see it with what’s been happening with Obama. So I specifically think we need stories to do with shape shifting, the movement from human to animal and back again. We can’t just talk about Geyer and the Greek myths all the time, we need to go to the tribal cultures as well with out feeling that they are pillaged. The wedding, this is a very European thing, the Irish especially. There is an Irish phrase the story tellers use “go forth in radiant contentment”, go out blessed, go out tingling and go out alive and get into it. Another lovely expression from the Irish culture ‘is this a private fight or can anyone get involved?’ If we are over the

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age of 20 and we are not in some sort of trouble then we are F**ked up, frankly we should be in trouble. So the wedding is the bringing together of the masculine, the feminine, whatever you think that is, and the village, and the forest and all that stuff, but its saying that some kind of alchemy happens. Something of magic happens, something of wake happens.

A way into myth if you are interested is that myth is about connotation not denotation, very important. Connotation, myth is promiscuous, it is not looking to be turned into a religious form, it wants to change shape, it is very open, it moves between cultures in forms of diffusion but also in terms of collective unconscious we dream these things up. Men and women will dream in new images to me. So it constellates in different forms through the centuries. I think myth is the heart of ecology, at the moment I am hearing a lot of the facts and statistics but I am not hearing so much of the story. I think it’s when you are connected to the story of something; you are connected to amore not agape. One of the things I am a Devonian, and I live up the road in Dartmoor. If someone said to me “do you love the world?” I love the small Devon ponies, I love their little tails. You come back at night and there is the mist on the moors. So find something that you love. The word roma is a latin word, it is a real village word, it means obligation, doing what you must, keeping the community together, handed down knowledge. But you turn roma around and you have amor, you have a bespoke passion. So something I am interested in in ecology is the idea of bringing in the myths and bringing in the stories, bringing in the juice.

I don’t think the old gods are fed by statistics, I think we need some sweet libation thrown in their direction.

Would you like to hear a quick story? They say in parts of Persia that if you don’t celebrate or wildly salute the story teller then you are a shoplifter so at certain points if I need your help please help me.

So what I am going to do now is just tell a very short bit of a much longer story, it’s a voyaging story and it touches on images that you all recognise, that you have lived through. It is your life we are talking about right now and lets see what happens. Normally I would have a drum and bells.

Once a long long time ago, so long ago it was when the world was a red deer dancing through the universe

on the back of a black whale and wherever that deer went and wherever that whale went flowers fell from their mouth. That’s how long ago this story is and in a time like that it was a day like this, it was a beautiful summers day and there was a great forest and the sun was coming down from that forest like congealed honey through the leaves. Had you been there as I was, there was a young man on a horse and he was a hunter, now this wasn’t the kind of horse you see very much anymore. Growing up in Devon in the 70’s you did see shire horses and this was like one of those horses. Were I to tell you about this horse its shoulders, the steam that came from it, the wild intelligence in its eyes, you would long to be riding a horse like that. So there is the young hunter going deeper into the forest into the deep green and the first thing he notices is that there are not many animals. It is very quiet, and it makes him think ‘what’s going on? There is nothing happening.’ Even as the thought is appearing in his head he turns a corner and on the track in front of him is a feather. This feather they say was as long as a swan’s wing and as wide as an eagle’s wing, and was a dark orange with red tips. It was so vibrant it was as if little bits of fire were pouring from it in each direction, and they say when he saw that feather everything in his life became a fog up until that moment. He was filled with desire for that feather. He found himself getting off the horse. The horse speaks to him. We don’t know if the horse has ever done this before but it said, don’t pick up that feather. If you pick up that feather you will come to know the meaning of trouble.

When you saw that feather in your life did you pick it up or did you go some other way?

So he is torn, the horse is giving him all this wonderful information. But there is that feather in front of him. But then he got thinking and thought maybe I don’t deserve that feather but I know the king would. So I’ll tell you what, compromise, lets take it to the king. So sure enough they turn up at this great palace and they open the doors of the palace. What is the sound the door makes in a story when you open it? So in he goes. When he gets to the inner sanctum there’s the king sitting there pontificating on his throne and he said what does the hunter want and he presents the feather to him. They say that the king held it up to the light and it was as if the whole of the hall was filled with rainbows from the magnificence and the opulence of this feather. Then the king got to thinking in the way that kings do, and he said “Well, a man that can bring

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me the feather of a firebird, which is what it was, it’s not really a gift fit for a king is it? If you can bring me a fire bird in her splendour in a cage, that would be a gift fit for a king. And if you don’t do this, if you don’t pull this off, if this doesn’t eloquently happen immediately, my knife will go through your throat like a hot knife through butter.

The hunter asks if he can have a word with his horse. So out he goes to the horse tears falling from his eyes and the horse looks at him, takes it on board, takes on the sorrow of the young man, looks deep at him and says. I told you so. Well listen don’t cry now, the trouble is not now the trouble is before you. And with that the horse gave enough strange instruction to the young man to get the firebird. The firebird is brought to the king after much enchantments going on, this is an upsetting image for me but this is what’s happening. There’s the fire bird in the cage, the king is looking at it and the king gets thinking and he says, a man that could bring a firebird in a cage, would surely notice that this entire kingdom is out of balance because there is no queen. You have a culture, you have a country with out a queen, you are in trouble. But being a king there is only one that will do, it has to be Vasalisa. Vasalisa who lives over nine lands and oceans on her skin boat, her little coracle boat, on the very edge of the world. No you go and get her beguile her, enchant her, do whatever you have to do, but bring her back to me so she will marry me and if you don’t do it I will chop off you head. He goes out weeping, the horse says I told you so, this is what you need. Go back to the king bring as much beauty as you physically can carry, and they would bring it on the backs of a horse in this huge bag. We should all have a bag of beauty that we are carrying around with us. In it put a beautiful big Arabic marquee tent, and apples, and meats, and 100 year old bottles of wine, and fresh hops, lager, and all sorts of gorgeous things. So he takes them with his across 9 lands and 9 oceans until they get to the very edge of the world. And there, on her boat, balancing perfectly on a profoundly deep sea, is Vasalisa. Well he wastes no time whatsoever. He gets up his tent, he had musical instruments with him, he had Persian rugs, incense from Tibet, he had all this food and fruit, and starts cooking. She has been going up and down this stretch of water for thousands of years. There is a deity dancing behind this woman and she has seen nothing on this beach ever and then suddenly there is music, cooking food, incense, a beautifully put up tent – a chamber of love I would go so far as to call it. Gradually her little coracle bit by bit, very slowly edges

towards the shore, she is in no hurry. He is playing music and quoting Pablo Neruda at her, and slowly she comes in and gets off the boat and she doesn’t look him in the eye and he keeps on playing, and he keeps singing and that’s a lovely thing especially with Persian poetry most of it was sung. It’s a gorgeous quote myth is the place where poetry are yet to diverge. Myth should have singing in it. So he is sitting there and she starts to eat and maybe it was an apple or maybe it was a chicken wing, we don’t know. Then she has a glass of that heavy wine and she starts to think I like the way this is turning out. Now he has moved on from Neruda and there is some Lorca in there as well. It’s just getting better and better. Then their eyes met, and he was worried at this point because he was meant to be getting her for the king, but what is going on in his chest, they said at one point he took his heart out of his chest and said you could have warned me this was going to happen and put it back in. They say she had eyes like the midnight and hair like the morning, and he got talking to her and said my blossoming branch, my sky women of the dawn, how could it have been that I have lived in the absence of your sweet smile for even a moment. And he meant it, and these things only work if you mean it and she carried on drinking the wine and he carried on drinking his and he kept playing his music and the poetry was coming and she fell asleep. The moment she fell asleep he put a cloak over her and tied her to the horse and took her to the king. She is annoyed by this, she will not even look at the king, she calls him he who will not be named. She says I won’t marry you and will not consider marrying you without my wedding dress. And he says, where would your wedding dress be? She says, back over nine lands and nine oceans at the bottom of the ocean at the deepest depths under a rock.

This is a very interesting point in the story we began in fire with the fire bird, and we are now moving always to water spirit and soul. So he has got to go back, and if he doesn’t he’ll be dead, weeping, horse, oh my god, come on lets go. So they go back to the beach and he says he can’t swim, how am I going to get the wedding dress from the bottom of the water if I can’t swim. At that point a crab appeared on the beach. The horse of power put his big hoof on the crab and said I want you to go down top the bottom of the ocean where there is that magical wedding dress with all your crustacean mates and bring it up. The crab said he knew where it was, and would the horse please remove the hoof and he’ll get on with it. The hoof was removed and the crab sand an incantational song that was so complicated and

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so holey, were I to sing it to you now your hair would fall immediately off your head, and judging by the look of things that must have already happened at some point in the conference. But I won’t do it. So all the crabs and all the things go down to the bottom of the water and they did indeed find the big rock, and they did indeed see the big wedding dress underneath. This wedding dress contained all the secrets from the grandmothers that had been whispering into this woman’s ear for so long and they were sewn in quite magically.

You should go nowhere near a man or a woman without a lot of secrets in your ear. The crabs pull the epic thing and up they come finally and there’s the wedding dress. They get it to the young man on the horse and he goes back and the wedding is being prepared. It’s the full scene, the meat, the roasting pigs, the apples, everything, the jugglers, the magicians, the minstrels and the gallery. They arrive with the wedding dress and she says now you have got the wedding dress I will marry you but, I have one last and very important requirement. I would not think of marrying you while that man still lives in this world. What I would like as my gift is for you to brew up a cauldron of boiling hot water right in the middle of this wedding scene and I want him to climb in. Hell has no fury. In you go you little b*****d and then I’ll marry you OK? For my part I have no great problem with this. Can I have one last word with my horse please? Certainly, off he goes. The horse says, cry now. But it is your death you are facing, and when you get back into that hall, and when you see the guards gathered and you see the faces and you see Vasalisa and you will see the king, and when you see the cauldron and you see the heat coming from it and the steam above it don’t be dragged, don’t beg for mercy, don’t run in another direction, don’t walk, run towards it. You run towards it, you run towards your death. He said, thanks for that. He walked back into the hall and a hush had descended and he did it. He started to walk and move faster and faster, jumped up in the air and bang, underneath the surface he went. One minute, he isn’t coming back, the occasional bubble, two, three minutes, a hand came up and went down again, then finally after 5 minutes he got up, and they say it was as if he had been burnished in gold. He was radiant, he had some of the firebird in him. They are astonished, the king is particularly astonished, and looking at the handsomeness of this young man, and he thought if a hunter looks that good after jumping into this cauldron, how good would I look as the king if I do it? So with his robes pontificating around him he ran

back to the edge of the hall and said I’m going in. He runs and jumps through the air. Splash, splosh, splish, in he goes and was never seen again. That is until they drained the water and they found a decrepit and rather used up old man at the bottom of the water. But the musicians are still there, the audience are still there, the kings and the queens are still there, and they said, we heard there is going to be a wedding. And now Vasalisa who was looking at the young man in a different way and in fact gradually during this whole scene they had grown closer together again, she said, I would have no great problem now with marrying this one. The party went on for 3 days and nights, but it was so wild, that they said after 3 days and 3 nights, we have got to do it again. And then they did it again. Johnny Cash ran a sweat lodge outside, Aretha Franklin did the Cossack Dancing, Joe Strummer came back for one last time, the Clash reunited with the Ramones, and Elvis. It was an amazing thing. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen had a Bardic showdown, Joni Mitchell was there and played only Court and Spark, and Blue, none of her difficult jazz albums, it was a great scene and it was a wonderful thing and it went on for a long time. One of the happiest guests was the fire bird that had been freed from the cage. Now that fire bird could often be seen at dusk dancing around the court yard and was welcome in the village and in the forest. That fire bird has ran down the centuries and through tribal people and through great cultures, whispering that story, he whispered it into my ear and I am whispering it into yours now and I’m wondering what you will all do with it? because that is all I know.

I would normally spend a whole weekend studying that story with you so you got a very condensed version, but all of the images in it are to do with that movement out and back again.

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/ Question

What brought you from the ‘tent’ to the university?

/ Martin

Because I went to the tent for a designated period of time, Do you remember that I mentioned a guy called Nicholas Black Elk? Who wrote Black Elk speaks. Oddly I was friends with his grandson. Who is a Lakota medicine man called Wallace Black Elk, he is dead now. I had a series of experiences that I was finding hard to understand and he said I recommend you go and live outside for 4 years in each of the 4 directions north, south, east, west. So I did it for a finite period because I knew I was coming back and I also think the reason I got lead to some extent into university life is because I love education, I love it, and I left school at 15 with no qualifications, nothing. So I think you never love culture more than when you are far away from it, and you see things clearly when you are far away from things and although I would argue that there is a cultural wildness as well. I saw education and art and music in a different light, and so when I came back I wanted to be more involved with it.

/ Question

(couldn’t quite hear it)

/ Martin

Do you remember the image I mentioned earlier about the soul of a man being female? Well the clue to this story is that it is an internal journey. And ultimately we can be in all different parts of the world and we feel kind of the same. In the last year I have gone form teaching in the desserts of New Mexico through Oregon, Brownstones in Brooklyn, and Minnesota, and all sorts of places. But it’s a movement towards the heart and it’s something about that. Stories have pin pricks of the eternal in them. There are story tellers and that have 2 types of time, there are story tellers he is thinking about, and there is the time, eternity is in love with the production if time, there is another kind of time that comes in with stories, they are bigger cycles, and they are just gorgeous, and if you are connected to them it is quite tricky to be depressed. You can work hard at it but it is tricky.

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VICKY LONG

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/ Project Director of the Cape Farewell Project

Cape Farewell has been a pioneer of the cultural response to climate change, bringing artists together with climate scientists on expeditions to the world’s climate tipping points. Excerpts of Vicky Long’s talk on the Cape Farewell project follow.

I thought I’d start with an ‘ice breaker’ and ask you to look at this photo. Don’t think too hard just give me a couple of words that come to mind when you look at it. I will be interested to see what the photograph evokes for you.

‘Cold; strata; jagged; serenity; deep; melt; expanse; church; smooth; monumental; reflecting…’

This is where Cape Farewell was last year, Sept/Oct 2008. It’s Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland. The glacier in the photograph is Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest glacier in retreat in the world, 38 metres a day, 16km in the last 10 years. It drains around 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet, which itself makes up 12% of the world’s glacial ice.

I started to work with Cape Farewell about four years ago and at the time I heard scientists say that they thought it likely that if business continued as usual by 2050 there would be no summer ice at the North Pole. I am now hearing, just four years on that this could be the case in 2015. So things are changing rapidly and we need to act now.

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Jacobshavn Glacier, West Greenland Vicky Long

In fact, through the Hadley Centre, David had met a number of oceanographers at the National Oceanography Centre and his idea was well supported. Ten years on, Cape Farewell has now led seven expeditions to the high Arctic, two of which have been youth voyages run in partnership with the British Council. In the centre of this photo you see Dr Simon Boxall, from the National Oceanography Centre, who has joined all of Cape Farewell’s voyages. You also see, Carol Cottrill from the British Geological Survey and Emily Venables from the Scottish Association of Marine Science. They are kneeling over Bob, the Argo float…

— Footage shown of Dr. Simon Boxall and team lowering the Argo float into the Greenland Sea, Cape Farewell 2007

Expedition —

Bob is named Bob because he really does bob. This Argo float is programmed to sit at about 1,000 metres below the surface of the ocean. Every 10 days it lowers itself a further 1,000 metres and then gradually makes its way up to the surface reading temperature and salinity as it goes. It beams all of that information via a satellite to the Oceanography Centre in Liverpool and this in turn is fed into an international database. Temperature and salinity can tell us a lot about how ocean currents are behaving. Any change in behavior is concerning; we rely on the regularity of ocean circulation to keep us at the temperatures we are used to! Argo floats are

deployed in oceans all around the world, but this Argo float is in the most northerly position. As well as the deployment of the Argo float, the oceanographers dropped lines over the boat at regular intervals, testing temperature and salinity from ocean surface to a depth of 200 metres. It was no easy task, often done at night and in extreme weather conditions. We all got involved in dropping the lines, pulling them up again and processing the data.

I want to turn to the artists now and their responses to Cape Farewell expeditions. This is a sculpture by Antony Gormely and architect Peter Clegg, created on Cape Farewell’s 2005 expedition. Here you see the east coast of Svalbard and the island of Spitsbergen.Some artists respond immediately - Antony and Peter were out there with a shovel, building and sculpting. The result: ‘Three Made Places’.

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Left to Right, Dr. Carol Cotterill, Dr. Simon Boxall and Emily Venables Vicky Long

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Antony Gormley & Peter Clegg, ‘Three Made Places’

David Buckland

When Sue was in the Arctic she asked others on the boat to participate in a dance but they were so restricted by their clothes that they could barely walk. It was very cold, about minus 30 and consequently they were all really wrapped up. Sue got more and more interested in the idea of just how vulnerable a human being is. The figure you see here, is the figure that flickers in the museum cabinet. For me the film speaks of is human ingenuity, of all that we are able to do, but also of an over-reaching and possibly extinction in that final crucifix.

In the Cape Farewell publication, Burning Ice, Peter Clegg writes about the shape to the right, the sarcophagus: ‘One Kilogram of CO2 at atmospheric pressure occupies 0.54 of a cubic metre. That is the volume – approximately, taken up by ourselves and the space immediately around us – it is roughly the volume occupied by a coffin, which is perhaps an appropriate symbolic unit when we are talking about the destruction of the planet.’

Here you see, the very first Cape Farewell exhibition, which took place in Oxford, Christmas 2005. You can see how Peter Clegg’s volume has made its way to the Bodleian Library. Kids loved this installation and it proved an effective way to communicate how much CO2 each of us, on average, emits per year. Each of us in the UK is responsible for around 10,000 of those blocks per year.

This is Art and Climate Change, a major exhibition we created in partnership with the Natural History Museum in 2006. It’s currently touring internationally with the Barbican. My favourite piece in this exhibition is a piece by the choreographer, Siobhan Davies. Inside the museum cabinet is a figure of a dancer flickering, moving. Siobhan, Sue, has used an old trick, named Pepper’s Ghost.

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The Ice Garden, Bodleian Library, OxfordBadger

Siobhan Davies, ‘Endangered Species’ Vicky Long

Ian McEwan joined the 2005 expedition and wrote an article for the Guardian upon his return, The Boot Room. Apparently people found it impossible to keep hold of their boots, coat, hat - it didn’t matter how carefully things were put on or under your peg in the boat’s Boot Room, the next morning, stuff would already have been taken by someone else and something too small or too large would be left for you. Ian was asking, how are we going to fix climate change of we can’t even manage our Boot Rooms, and I think he had an inkling at that time that there was something in this Boot Room behaviour that would lead to further writing. Ian went on to write a piece for the book, Burning Ice, which accompanies the exhibition Art and Climate Change. I’ll read a very short passage from that text.

‘We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime. Now we are asked to address the well-being of the unborn individuals we will never meet and who, contrary to the usual terms of human interaction, will not be returning the favour.’

Four years after returning from the Arctic, Ian has completed a novel which to be published sometime next year. I believe one of the central characters is an extremely floored eco entrepreneur and it’s a darkly humorous read!

As I speak Cape Farewell’s first expedition to somewhere other than the Arctic is going on. We have a very small team on a pilot expedition in the Peruvian Andes, trekking through the cloud and then rain forests of the Amazon. Immediately after we invited the writer Yann Martel to join this expedition, he wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister alerting him to Cape Farewell. Has anyone come across Yann’s project, What is Steven Harper Reading? Yann sends a book to the Canadian Prime Minister once every two weeks and with that book he writes a cover letter saying why he thinks it’s worth reading. Yann has never heard back from the Steven Harper. Well, Yann sent Burning Ice his cover letter read:

‘Climate change on its own is an impersonal force, deeply disempowering. Art inspired by climate change, because the making of art is personally involving, a whole-person activity, is empowering, both for the maker and the spectator.’

Further discussion ensued about the processes of making art in relation to climate change, plus conversation about Cape Farewell’s producing partnerships with organisations such as Eden Project, Cornwall and Southbank Centre, London

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Cape Farewell Expedition to Peru

2009

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JORMA PURANEN

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/ Narrating the North

1.The notion of landscape is very strong in Nordic countries. During the construction of the nation state, landscape images were used to configure ideas of nation, ethnicity, culture and territory, thereby producing a sense of coherence and unity in the relation between national identity and the territory of the national state. In this sense the landscape image was used to configure space and to naturalize ways of seeing and thinking about Nordic nationality. After the constitution of Finland and as an independent state, ideas about Finnish nationality continued to be considered and presented through landscape, either in the form of images of untouched nature or cultural landscapes which emphasized the relationship between man and landscape.

The colonial history of the Nordic region is a dark chapter that seems to have slipped the memory of many of the Nordic populations. Although it continues to make itself very much felt in the region s former colonies, this history is alarmingly absent in the collective memory of the once colonizing Nordic countries. Furthermore Polar nations have, to a large extent, shaped their identities, and legitimated their interests, through narratives of northern exploration and colonization. It is particularly these narratives, stories and histories that constitute the basis for my photographic work. Through “spatial practice” I seek to evoke a cultural world of individuals, places, memories, and practices.

Dialogue between past and present concerns lies at the very heart of my interest. The last few landscape projects I have carried out from early 1990 s on have all had their starting point in different visual imagery drawn from museum collections and archives, be it old anthropological photographs, ancient maps or scientific illustrations of northern cultures and expeditions. My ongoing project Icy Prospects, in turn, has its source in historical paintings, which depict arctic scenes, landscapes and seascapes. Central to all these projects is my interest in museum as a place where different cultural visions are negotiated.

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Swedish Arctic expedition to Splitsbergen 1908

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Imaginary Homecoming 21991

2.Archive pictures can act as a trigger to memories, true or false, sharply evoke a sense of time and nostalgia, or conjure fantasies of history. They also seem to have resources to draw together a collection of voices and perspectives to examine and activate history as it is embedded in the landscape. My method is concerned with collecting historical images in a kind of my own archive which will result in reconstruction and re-articulation of history in a spatial perspective.

My approach to the “archive” is both conceptual and institutional. I dream and imagine through archive and study historical images in order to understand the terms and conditions of lives of people back in history.

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Arctic Archives 42007

/ Curiosus Naturae Spectator

By a means of reversal I was looking ways to continue exploring ideas that were proposed in my earlier body of work Imaginary Homecoming (1991-1996). The symbolic focus in the staging of homecomings then shifted towards using early maps and scientific illustrations of northernmost Scandinavia, or Lapland, made by European explorers during 15th and 17th centuries.

For those coming outside of the region these maps were an essential tool in making sense of the unknown terrain. Mapping formed an important activity during the journeys. The Northern regions were relatively unknown territories, and during every journey to these lands and seas, new enquiries were made for the purposes of mapmaking. This was, actually, one of the most important tasks of the geographers. My work

highlights the contrast with the native Sámi people who had never needed maps, knowing and interacting as intimately with the landscape they inhabit as they do.In the series Curiosus Naturae Spectator (1995-1998) I printed Latin words on silk sheets, which were in turn carefully placed into the landscape as a deliberate act of disruption or a new framing of a particular scene. Latin was the language of the Enlightenment, the language of poets and philosophers, but also the hard language of reason and classification. It is this language that makes our distance from nature most explicit.

3.These silk sheets resemble pages and curtains, reminding us of this difference between language and landscape.

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Systema Naturae1997

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Language is a Foreign Country1998

/ Language is a Foreign Country

There is now simultaneous interest in contemporary art in both mobility and attachment to a place. Narratives of place and unattachment now have a central role. Places, landscapes and their images are also important political metaphors. The Arctic is often associated with mental images of something immense and boundless, of endless distance. Images that in themselves are like an invitation to Otherness and Elsewhere. A voyage across the sea also was an encounter with the unknown, both metaphorically and in practice.

Western travel practice was grounded by a historical vision, what Gayatri Spivak calls a ”worlding”, in which one section of humanity was restless and expansive, the rest rooted and immobile. From the moment the expedition had said farewell to home, the crew was surrounded by the uncivilized world. Many travel accounts depict the first encounter with the Northern folk at some length. At the same time, it was clear that the encounter was far from being equal. It was a meeting of a civilization and a savage tribe, the former seen as superior to the latter. The Inuit, for example, were described as dirty, isolated, unwilling to co-operate and having no manners whatsoever.

What most of the travellers and explorers could not see is that the northern landscape had already been humanised by people who lived there. The indigenous peoples had created a culture, which read that landscape and filled it with meanings, but travellers could not see them. Instead they saw the landscape that was completely meaningless and people living there who were incapable of placing meaning on the landscape. This situation has of course changed now. We understand that indigenous peoples had a culture, but we could not recognise it.

4.In 1998 I started a project, which was to be called Language is a Foreign Country (1998-2001). In this work I once again created environmental installations, which in turn have been photographed to form a series of images. In these images I seek to question our conventional assumptions about the perception and memory of landscape. Using fragments of local languages (Sámi, Greenlandic) I wanted to address those areas of our experience of space/landscape that lie somewhere between our visual depiction and linguistic pronunciation.

The words we choose may be precise and meaningful, but overall experience of that space remains untranslatable, as ‘meaningless vocables’. Language is a Foreign Country led me think more clearly of the ways how language and narratives continually bring into focus our relationship to landscape – aiming to ‘find one s feet in the world’. This relationship is full of ambivalencies, of the irrational and rational, inside and outside, subjective and objective – just as the medium of photography.

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Icy Prospects 52005

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Icy Prospects 172005

/ Icy Prospects

In conversation with the French photographer Raymond Depardon Paul Virilio noted that “he is nostalgic about the magnitude of the world, about its scale”. Guided by the same kind of sensation I started a new work in the Arctic in the year 2005. The idea of this project Icy Prospects arose from reading histories of polar expeditions, Arctic lore, and from watching tourists on the furthest promontory of Nordkapp (North Cape) in northern Norway. Nordkapp is a place where tourists throng from all parts of Europe to admire the last northern shore of our continent.

Books written by Arctic travellers are an interesting blend of scientific and literary fashion. They are astonishing adventure tales filled with descriptions of both ineptitude, boredom, frostbite, isolation and hunger, and, on the other hand, of victory, discovery, the sublime and human capability.

5.In addition, I remember from my childhood my father’s stories about the Arctic Ocean from when he worked on fishing boats near Petsamo until the outbreak of the Second World War. The trawlers would go as far as Bear Island, situated between Spitsbergen and the Finnmark coast.

Icy Prospects has its source in historical paintings that depict Arctic landscapes and seascapes. While working with the portrait painting project Shadows, Reflections and All That Sort of Thing in different museums, I watched the shimmering reflections of museum exteriors on surfaces of highly varnished painted panels. Inspired by these lacquered paintings of past centuries, I painted a carefully sanded piece of wooden board with black, glossy paint to give it a reflecting, mirror-like texture. I then took the board outdoors into the icy northern landscape and photographed the fragmentary reflection of the landscape on the surface of the board. My first experiences of photographing Arctic landscapes through these black wooden boards reminded me of holding a daguerreotype in hand, how nothing but an exact angle of light on a copper plate makes the image visible.

In Icy Prospects I combine three different interests of mine: long-term work in the North and the Arctic, the archive, and the use of reflecting light as a metaphor for speaking of history and memory. Reflections of daylight on surface of historical paintings or printed images blur them sometimes completely unidentifiable and always difficult to look at. Blurring of images emphasizes the impossibility to consider history as objective truth, rather suggesting a fictive historical world.

By using a plethora of literary and visual historical pickings, I seek to create of a cultural space created by different fates and histories, places, connections and encounters. Through experiences of travel, borderland, and identity, I create a matrix of fact and fiction, which I translate into images and narratives, a field of fantasy and geographical imagination. Even if Icy Prospects seems to focus on the sensory experience of northern space, I rather wish to generate narrative possibilities, to point to the twilight zone of what might have happened.

6. By dislocating archival and museum material from its original purpose and intention, the new corpus of photographs of Icy Prospects seeks to reveal new readings, meanings, and questions, to suggest a fictive historical world.

I worked with Icy Prospects in furthermost Lapland and by the Arctic Ocean in Finnmark of northern Norway from 2005 until early 2009. Driving down the sparse roads of Finnmark in the chiaroscuro hours, chasing the sun to rise or set, I developed an intimate relation to the silent places of high latitudes.

In Icy Prospects painterly quality is associated with the feeling of danger in unknown landscapes, the perspective of the stranger. However, I am not interested in imitating painting or considering photography with the concepts of painting. This question is of a closer viewing of historical paintings, experiencing them and an attempt to expand their attendant ambiguous space to apply also to our own time. In this work, almost hallucinatory visions are like the echoes of ancient

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expeditions lost in the Arctic seas. I am reminded of the story about J. M. W. Turner, who told that he had himself bound to the mast of a ship to experience the extremes of a storm in order to paint the world in a more credible manner.

Indeed, hallucinations, sky emerging from the sea and odd features of nature made the Western eye to see what it expected to see and Western mind understand the sight according to the Western thinking.

Suddenly, a flash of light hit our eyes. And, as if created by some magical powers, a wonderful view opened before our eyes. There was that strange Arctic hush and misty light over everything – that greyish-white light caused by the reflection from the ice being cast high into the air against masses of vapour, the dark land offering a wonderful contrast.

/ Roald Amundsen

7.For twenty years I have been engaged in landscape projects in which I have prevented direct viewing of the landscape by putting something in between the viewer and the subject: transparent portraits, phrases in Latin, flags. They have served as obstacles of a kind, denying any admiration of the northern landscape as such. In this new work, Icy Prospects, the possibility of direct viewing is completely denied. What we see now is a mere reflection of the landscape. Jean-Luc Godard has said that “a photograph is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of that reflection.”

Jorma PuranenJorma Puranen 6667

6767 Jorma Puranen

Travels on Canvas 12003

Where compasses all go mad2007