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MeltFriday 12 September to Friday 3 OctoberOpening on Thursday 11 September 5-7pm
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images
Dee Copland |
Dee Copland |
Dee Copland |
Dee Copland |
Dee Copland |
Dee Copland |
Lesley Duxbury |
Lesley Duxbury |
Lesley Duxbury |
Lesley Duxbury |
Kirsten Haydon |
Kirsten Haydon |
Kirsten Haydon |
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ESsay
it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good1
In the Romantic spirit of psychological accounts of experience, French social historian Alain Corbain's book The Lure of the Sea2 details the exploration of how the seaside was understood between 1750-1840 in Western culture. Of interest, with respect to the artworks by Kirsten Haydon, Dee Copland and Lesley Duxbury in this exhibition, is the manner in which the author of the account goes about an attempt to create a perspective of the subject. Specifically the understanding and knowledge about what tells us of the way in which people think, act and behave; and how these understandings of a place via attitudes are informed by highly influential networks of artistic, economic, social, scientific and spiritual sensibilities in combination with active research skills.
With the burgeoning experiences afforded by the relative increase in the pace of current climate change, the world is coming to terms with phenomena that can be witnessed at the periphery as well as in our daily lives through fossil fuel pricing, social policies, water shortages, and general patterns of weather conditions. Taking the two outer most locations of the globe each of the artists in Melt uses the place to elucidate knowledge of physical entities that may in time be lost, and only be known to us through primary historical records generated through art, natural history, antiquarian, science, virtual and anthropological museums.
In Melt, each of the artists uses her senses as an intrinsic research tool to inform resolved artworks that elaborate remote (arguably evanescent) places through her respective trip to the Arctic or Antarctic regions. The investigation of and reflection upon these sites as culturally informative sources of knowledge allows for much conceptual and physical discovery. In using her skills as an artist-researcher each sets out with parameters that aid her creative encounters and interests whilst allowing for the possibilities and impact of the unknown that ultimately occurs when undertaking such ambitious projects.
Lesley Duxbury headed to Baffin Island (in the Canadian Arctic) in 2006 furthering her progressive exploration of distant locations such as, the Isla Navarino (in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, as far south in world as one can go apart from Antarctica), the Long Range in western Newfoundland, Canada, the mountains of Yemen and the Wadi Rum in Jordan3. Each of these journeys (and the ones still to come), for Duxbury is a deliberate movement in her research enquiry into the landscape through bodily presence. Duxbury discovered upon completion of a major research study (her doctorate) that such locations were a core aspect of her artistic research. In purposefully pacing these subsequent investigations through direct contact with the elements by walking, hiking and camping (not unlike the journeys of past explorers) the artist lives the journey of making her work through sensory motivated photographic and drawing based primary data.
The photographic/sculptural installation in Melt resulting from the Baffin Island research is a series of works titled Lost(for)Words, (2008). It evokes a haunting sense of oblivion. As containers of loss through poetic interplays of language, ephemeral materiality and landscape the works appear to be visually dissolving in front of us. The scientific overture of the various parts Duxbury produced for Melt, exemplified best in the quasi numerical coding system on the landscape images and the snow words (wax) read as catalysts for a new visuality of loss. It's as if the numbers and the wax (given its material plasticity), will come to stand in for the visualization, thereby rendering it lost given time. And not unlike the way we approach historical landscape paintings, we will read them in past tense, as visual accounts of places no longer in existence.
Dee Copland's visit to Antarctica, 2001/02 resulted from eight years' of inquiry into the concept of survival in relation to human ecology, adaptation, human and maritime history and climatic changes4. Combined with a shorter Ketch5 trip to the sub Antarctic Auckland Islands in 1995, Copland's interest in Antarctica was a development of these earlier research motivations. Shifting to the Heroic Age6 of exploration, the artist began to focus on the individual thought and enterprise of those who encounter places of such magnitude. Copland like Duxbury had many preliminary methodological tests to do ensuring that equipment, both survival and artistic would be operational. Copland devised her own chemicals, printing media and techniques using her small domestic freezer to test the artistic processes she was to possibly drawn upon in Antarctica. In combination with this pre-Antarctic preparation and research the actual experience of the trip for Copland afforded creative conclusions she would never have imagined. The series titled By Degrees - 3°C (2008), on exhibit in Melt evolved from eleven marker flags. Whilst currently operational, these flags have demonstrated signs of their "working life" through the physical erosion they experience by way of the harsh climatic conditions of the ice shelf on which they are currently located. They too seem to be disappearing in time with the impact of climate.
Also referencing the Heroic Age of exploration, Kirsten Haydon undertook her research in Antarctica with a strikingly different interest and purpose. Investigating the cultural construct of a souvenir Haydon's inquiry lead to ideas of translation across personal memento to historical artefact in museum display7. Pursuing the latent psychology of objects recovered from expeditions on exhibit in museum collections, and comparing these with that of her own exploration to the Scott Base in Antarctica, Haydon's account of such challenging places comes from the ideas around the recovery of objects and how they become invested with vernacular history. Producing her own objects made from the use of various technologies such as enameling, the artist brings into question the nature of what investment in objects can demonstrate. On the one hand it's a Romantic nostalgia for the experiential, the ability of objects to take us on personal, stream of consciousness associations to a place through our imaginations. On the other it is the opportunity to actively invest re-made objects through individual bias directing the encounter of place with subtle socio-political currents. Indeed the works Haydon produces link in a latent way the viewers' experience of the object in and of itself, with that of the historical movement of objects through travel and ultimately their return as specimens in a museum. Haydon's objects create an unconscious journey of vernacular association for both herself and the viewer.
If a word in and of itself can iterate infinite poetic promise then melt must surely be one of them. Presented to us in the works of Kirsten Haydon, Dee Copland and Lesley Duxbury are quite different research results, yet it is valuable to think about the consistencies amongst the ideas that each and collectively the exhibition generates. In approaching these specific locations certain qualities and characteristics of the psychology of these places cannot be ignored. In terms of mapping, these places are remote, distant and for most of us, only known through documentary modes of communication such as (past and present) literary, audio visual and scientific accounts. Our knowing is for the most part a secondary experience through fact and fictions. We come to understand their significance as markers of environmental change through the impact upon the culture of the place and its reach outside of itself over time. The artworks in Melt are testimony to the active way in which we can understand place through its psychology in visual art practice.
Beyond the artists' experiences of these places, if we look to the Inuit living in the Arctic regions for another perspective on what the affect of climatic change is causing we encounter narratives about alteration of long held traditions and customs, coming to terms socially (in very short durations of time) with changes that challenge established patterns of existence. One such interpretation by Duxbury in her 24 words for snow piece,8 is an ironical and poetic musing on the linguistically abundant vocabulary of the Inuit. Likewise the layering of text from accounts in journals of Western explorers from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century in which words that describe what loss is, establish a dialogue about the inherent characteristics of the experience of the location. Copland's flags symbolically mark the iterative nature of existence at Scott Base, who has traveled by way of these flags, what were they pursuing on such journeys?
Embarking on creative investigations into regions such as the Arctic and Antarctic through journeys involving walking, climbing, sailing and flying we, the audience become metaphysical passengers on three unique research missions. Entering into a landscape through the eyes of each artist provides us with a rich source of possibility. It gives us an empathetic mapping of the location whilst relying on a valuing of the aesthetic qualities each artist utilizes to inform our knowledge of these enigmatic places.
Lisa Byrne
Endnotes:
1-
First recorded in John Heywood's "A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546":"An yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men say."
2- Alain Corbain The Lure of the Sea: The discovery of the seaside 1750-1840 Penguin 1994 Trans. 1996 UK
3- Lesley Duxbury email interview 28/07/08
4- Dee Copland email interview 1/08/09
5- Ketch is a boat with a two-masted rig in which the larger, or mainmast, is forward, and the smaller mizzenmast is stepped aft-but forward of the rudder and usually, of the helm.
6- Heroic Age commenced 1901 with Captain Robert Falcon Scott and ended ostensibly with Ernst Shackleton's expedition in 1917
7- Kirsten Haydon draft exegesis 30/07/08
8- The Baffin Island Inuit have 24 words for describing snow.
Catalogue
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Invitation
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