The Cold Library of Ice

Cape Farewell, The Cold Library of Ice
David Buckland, 2004

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David Buckland expressed frustration that there was information in his head about the Arctic landscape that just wasn’t coming through in all the photographs he had been taking of its astonishing beauty.

Selecting fragments of text from Gretel Erlich‘s story, The future of ice, written after her 2004 Cape Farewell residency, David Buckland projected her words from a moving ship onto an ice cliff in the Arctic.

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Words glide over ice and are re-shaped by the landscape’s passing forms, animating a dialogue between the writer, video artist and the landscape itself:
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GLACIERS
KNEEL – THEIR LEGS GONE
A WIND AGE & A WOLF AGE
BEFORE THE WORLD IS WRECKED
THE COLD LIBRARY OF ICE

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The Arctic landscape has been animated with text, the ice a site of animating dialogue.

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Buckland argues that for people listening to the stories scientists tell us – of London being underwater in years to come for example – is

like a horror movie…its just something that’s beyond human scale …so they don’t get involved…and what the artist does is somehow find the human scale of story telling.

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In June last year, a chance encounter led me to an exhibition at London’s British Museum. Artworks made in response to changes in the Arctic landscape suggested ways of seeing and responding to changes in Antarctica.

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These works could be seen, heard, read and felt. Installations included a dance, a sound sculpture, a film, photographs, and a sculpture of bones. Artists working in different media had traveled to the Arctic on one of the Cape Farewell expeditions. Initiated by video artist David Buckland, “The aim of the voyage was to raise public awareness about global warming.” (Hinton, 2005)

They included: writer Ian McEwan, Photographer Gautier Deblonde, Musician/sound artist Max Eastley, Sculptor Dan Harvey, Sculptor Heather Ackroyd, Artoonist – Michele Noach, Sculptor Antony Gormley, Sculptor Rachel Whiteread, Choreographer Siobhan Davies

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Watching again the DVD on sale at that show, Art from a changing Arctic (Hinton, 2005), I take notes:

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Choreographer Shioban Davies describes the Arctic landscape from the physical perspective of her own body. When she asks us “to understand the idea of protection, of care”, she could be asking for the protection and care of the land as much as for our own body. Her work, Endangered Species, suggests humanity has built herself frameworks separating ourselves from land.

She brings to a human scale the story of landscape care:

The beauty, the sheer physical beauty is already something that imprints on me…it’s a skin over something far more ferocious…I sense a cold…I sense a vulnerability…I feel myself as something hot and bloody…my body, if it was harmed, the flesh would bleed…so I find my warmth, the little bit of warmth that I have, I need to protect…I would ask people to understand the idea of protection, of care.

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…to see the beauty of what we stand to lose…simple things like the music of ice and snow under your boots…purity of light…to walk all day in a kind of strange sunset…it protecting it we will be protecting much more…

We’ve got to have a starting point for an environmental ethics, and I would say there are certain things that are self-evidently good…the richness and diversity of biological life is one…and that rather difficult numinous way that landscape affect us…why are they so beautiful? Two or three centuries ago people regarding that glacier would’ve seen it as rather chaotic and frightening in fact, but now we find it hard not to see that beauty…So I would start to say that its a good in itself…we need to protect it.
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…if we regard these kinds of wildernesses at the Poles as feathers that you hold up in a very slight breeze, they register so sensitively what’s happening right across the planet.

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If you’re looking for some way into this subject you have to do it not in terms of landscape…you have to find the human angle.

(Ian McEwan, 2005)

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What did the artists do when they first arrived in the landscape?

They walked, looked, and they took photographs.

The light changes so dramatically and so quickly…you never take twice the same picture even if you use the same subject…it’s always different, it’s always kind of starting again…at the end of the day…is more interesting to me…you start to lose sense of time and space..is really for me what this place is all about…sense of losing yourself into the white…there’s a sense of anxiety…I think I am taking photos of landscapes that are vanishing…

(Gautier Deblonde, 2005)

Max Eastley used wooden flutes to register the music of the wind.

I love these places…here it’s absolutely a pristine sound environment…there’s a tradition to make music from the wind in instruments, for instance the Aolean flutes…in a sense its one of the only authentic sounds we’ve got from the past…what I’m making is a kind of inanimate music. It’s not human music. You think in terms of nature bing slow, but you’re missing it all the time…it’s very very fast…

The composing process for me is trying to absorb the visual movement. It’s a landscape, a moving landscape…the sound of the waves…the sound of the wind… the sound of the birds…the sounds of ice…this is something that i feel deeply inside…this is so large and so beautiful, how am I going to react to it? …engage with it?…and create something which is of the nature of this place?

(Max Eastley, 2005)

I think of the old steel cables holding down Mawson’s original huts and masts, and the sounds they made – described by Jack Ward and Fred Elliott in the 1950s.
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Dan Harvey and Heather Ackroyd seek way of working with nature to make their art. They placed blocks of plaster in water, allowing the water to shape them through erosion.

We come to a place like this and there’s none of the things we’re used to…there’s so much of something else and the other…its all sculpted by the freezing, the thawing, the sea, the wind…the patterns of nature…I s’pose that we’re…artificially…arrive at a similar sort of thing…everything on the planet is in a state of change and flux and movement…and what we are trying to do is find some way of recording those changes…

(Dan Harvey, 2005)

Harvey and Ackroyd made a sphere of ice clear enough to be used as a lens to focus the sun.
They used the crystallization process as a way of making images.
They built a pin-hole camera from a block of snow, and used it to focus images on a screen of ice.
They tried to build a big enough ice lens to burn something.

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While the artists were exploring the landscape in various ways, scientists on board the ship were measuring the temperature and salinity of the Arctic waters, and trawling for plankton. Plankton absorb over 70% of the carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Changes in the concentrations and diversity of plankton in the sea influence changes in the earth’s climate as a whole.

Polar research station Ny-Ã…lesund is the most northerly human settlement on earth. The amount of toxic gas from the industrial world travels here on the wind. Because the air is so pure here, increases detected in carbon dioxide here indicate increasing global levels.

The sub-Antarctic regions such as Macquarie and Heard Islands, respond most dramatically to global warming. The same applies in the northern hemisphere. For example, the rate of ice melt in Spitzbergen, Norway, indicates that there will be no ice there at all in 50 years time.

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Artoon by Michele Noach
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Until you see the ice in relation to familiar object, such as a ship or a bird, it is difficult to know its scale:

I think the scale is astonishing…and also really difficult to adjust to and get any sense of measurement…I think everything is to do with one’s work. there’s this experience, and then goes into the subconscious, then it’s in the work.

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I’ve been trying to devise graphs and measuring tools …implements that is some sort of way would be able to measure the unmeasurable of where we are…and it definitely has to do with watching the scientists doing their measuring…again it’s back to the scale thing,,,we’re in this very epic scenery…and they’re here looking through microscopes…there’s something quite comic about that.

This (pointing to a small collage) is a mute luxometer which gives a sort of light reading of the level of speechlessness that you feel at seeing the Northern Lights…

(Michele Noach)

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“You’re hearing a 10,000 year compressed event”, says sound artist Max Eastley, when you hear the ice crystals of a glacier melting.

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On puzzling over how to cast a piece of glacial ice, sculptor Heather Ackroyd asks:

How can you preserve the state of change?..well not preserve it…how do we stop it, how to we inhibit it…how do we just keep it that little bit longer , savour it that little bit longer…so other people can go ‘Wow, isn’t that beautiful’ too.

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Not all the artists made works on location. Sculptor Rachel Whiteread said:

My main objective was to walk whilst I was here…the first moment I came out into it I felt like an astronautic…landed on this place…you feel like you shouldn’t actually be here…it’s not a place for humans really…

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Sculptor Anthony Gormely and Architect Peter Clegg sawed geometrical spaces into the ice, “like the tombs of Khartoum”.

The only thing I brought as an idea to work on was to do with a visualization of global warming. The unit that we use to describe the global warming potential of a building is a kilogram of C02. And it comes out that at atmospheric pressure a kilogram of C02 occupies a space that is .54 of a cubic meter. I worked out that it’s the size of a coffin.

What we’ve done in a tiny way is make a construction that conforms, or is attempting to conform, to the absolutes of Euclidean geometry…In some sense he’s talked about the human animal and the way that the human animal insists on making its shelter according to these abstract principles. No other animal does that… (the sculpture is) a foreign object…it’s like a space ship…for me its been very precious reinforcement that I think one feels very deeply anyway…of how we’re a kind of gnat on the nose of a very indifferent universe.

(Peter Clegg)

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What I liked was the idea that you could take that idea and then in a way make it again, in terms of space, making a shelter…it’s kind of a minimal building…the least space that a man might need…the third element…it’s a snow cave…it’s an expression of our need always to see the world from a sheltered place…and hopefully we will make it large enough to hold a body of people…say the ship’s company…should the ship burn.

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What being in here (the ‘tomb’) is powerfully about is that relationship between the made human world and and the inherited earth that’s out there in that blue light that goes on for ever.

(Anthony Gormely)

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The landscape can be overwhelming:

I think the point of us coming is that we don’t know…we don’t know how to do it…I’m hoping maybe that I can, somehow, in the work that I do, do something related…I feel slightly hopeless…what can i offer with my presence here?…I think it will be something that will feedback later…I can’t tell you what that will be…I make things, I don’t put things into words

(Rachel Whiteread)

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