Endangered Species
Siobhan Davies, 2006
Siohan Davies went to the Arctic in 2002, as an artist on the second Cape Farewell expedition.
I am interested to know how she devised her video installation, Endangered Species. I saw it at the Science Museum in 2006, in the Cape Farewll exhibition, Burning Ice: Art & Climate Change.
With its intricate play on some basic moves, through repetition and variation, I suspect it had been improvised, and later refined and edited. The tiny figure resembled a hologram, articulating flexible rods in a small glass case. To me, it symbolized mankind trapped within its own constructs. It also symbolized the extremes of polar landscape, through its stark use of black and white.
Visiting her London studio, I book in to three workshops next week, in movement improvization.
Improvisation is highly appropriate as a way to approach the Poles. You are seeking knowledge of a new terrain. You plan as much as you possibly can, but conditions are always going to be unpredictable. You have to be open to suggestions, and find your own focus at the same time.
Entering into the Arctic landscape, the Cape Farewell artists approached it from their different practices. They expecting the unexpected.
Greg Hilty writes, the catalogue of the Cape Farewell exhibition, that…
The artists had no defined brief to behave in any specific way or to deliver concrete outcomes. Even if they had had a general expectation of producing art objects, they had no standard methodology to bring to the context other than the history of their own creative practices, carried out in strikingly different surroundings.
He acknowledges the instability of such an approach as symbolic of the unstable future we all share.
This unstable condition represented a concise simulation of the condition we will all find ourselves in, faced with some future radical environmental change.
Unsurprisingly, a sense of teetering instability and disintegration could bee identified in many of the artworks in the exhibition: in the fleeting female forms of David Buckland’s Messanger, projected onto ice; the entropy inherent in the perfect ice rectangle, Monolith 2005/ 78.30N, 16.30E, by Peter Clegg and Antony Gormley; the disintegrating human form of Shioban Davies’s Endangered Species, appearing and disappearing through blackness and a maze of rods.
Hilty writes more of Davies:
She went, she said, anticipating feelings of wonder and awe in the face of the open spaces of the arctic. Once there, her overwhelming sensation was, ‘I must go for a walk. Doing so took considerable preparation to ensure the body was padded and protected against the cold and the wind. The insouciant independence of the urban being was obliterated and Siobhan’s overriding impressions were not so much of the landscape as she moved through, but the vulnerable, almost incidental body she had brought into this uncompromising environment. …Her attention focused on her bones, skin, breath; on the effort and basic purpose behind her every movement.
On her return to London, Davies conceived the idea for a piece that would …
embody some of the primal emotions and rational thoughts the journey had evoked for her. She wanted to create an image of a small, semi-human figure, displayed in a museum vitrine as if it were a branch of the human species that had either died out or was yet to evolve, or existing in a parallel world.
The figures of Juan Munoz, like Shadow, have this effect.
These human representations are fluid, illusory, unstable.
.
That there is no one way to know a place we can accept most readily when confronted with those places.
When artists Max Eastly, Dan Harvey and Heather Ackroyed allowed the natural forces of wind and water to shape their artworks, Hilty argues that these resulting forms are no more ‘real’ than any other. Defined by the forces of the landscape through human engagement with it…
Together they form a multi-dimensional representation that helps us both understand and emotionally grasp the dynamic nature of the sea off Svalbard.
Sinking cubes of plaster in water and hauling out the water-pattered forms, is a way of physically engaging with the landscape. Engaging physically with the landscape opens us up to feelings about it. Different kinds of gestures arouse different emotions. Working in this was creates a record of the dynamic forces at work in nature, and of one’s physical engagement with these.
The works of the Cape Farewell project, Hilty continues,
…provide portals of comprehension for ideas and experiences relating to the impacts of climate change…
There is a place, he continues, for “collaboration and image-making in the shaping of human consciousness.”
Christine McMillan is working in these ways in Australia.