Artistic tales of Earth's two thawing poles | New Scientist
25/10/15 00:56
DAILY NEWS 24 January 2014
Artistic tales of Earth’s two thawing poles (Image: Elizabeth Ogilvie, Out Of Ice, Ambika P3/Photographer: Michael Mazière)
Few things accelerate productivity quite like a pressing deadline. So with the Arctic predicted to be ice-free during the summer within decades, it’s hardly surprising to see flurries of activity taking place in relation to the North Pole. But it’s not just scientists, researchers and oil companies; artists, too, are getting in on the act. And this week sees another, as Elizabeth Ogilvie’s Out of Ice opens at Ambika P3, the cavernous former construction hall of the University of Westminster’s School of Engineering in London. The last few years have seen an increasing number of art projects exploring Earth’s poles from a diverse range of perspectives. Particularly dramatic was the 2012 film Chasing Ice, which documented the singular obsession of environmental photographer James Balog to show the demise of glaciers in the Arctic. Prior to that, film director Werner Herzog turned to Antarctica and chose to focus not so much on the changing environment but rather its impact on the people who live there. The result, 2007’s Encounters at the End of the World, remains a claustrophobic high point in this genre. More overtly aligned with a climate change agenda has been work like ScanLAB’s Frozen Relic, which incorporated millimetre-perfect 3D scanning technology to capture the dimensions of a series of Arctic ice floes before “refabricating” them on a small scale. And There is Always Something More Important, an imposing fibreglass cast of an iceberg by Mariele Neudecker. At the 2013 Venice Biennale – a major event in the contemporary art calendar – blocks of melting ice were shown simultaneously inside lightboxes by Tavares Strachan from the Bahamas and outside on the street by Stefano Cagol from Italy. Perhaps the most engaging of the various artistic approaches to climate change was High Arctic, a multisensory installation by United Visual Artists in 2011. It combined interactive adventure, light, darkness, poetry and sound to beguiling effect, and was a worthy inaugural exhibition for the Sammy Ofer Wing at the National Maritime Museum in London. High Arctic was the result of a collaboration with the arts and climate science foundation Cape Farewell. Founded in 2001, Cape Farewell has organised Arctic visits for some of the world’s leading artists, writers and scientists. Ian McEwan’s novel Solar is probably the best known result of these initiatives. It is in this crowded field that Elizabeth Ogilvie now presents Out of Ice. The exhibition includes a number of video pieces that document both the beauty of the natural landscape and the harsh realities of everyday life for Inuit inhabitants of northern Greenland. Another film is made up of footage shot by a British Antarctic Survey expedition to Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica. The exhibition also boasts several large panoramic landscape photographs and a single text work. Hard to read in the dark underground space, it’s a loose interpretation of the Inuit word inuksuk (a kind of person-shaped cairn) as “an internal compass that will guide us as we decide what environmental legacy we will leave”. Most striking is a large-scale installation, which forces visitors to tread carefully around two vast pools of water that shimmer blackly amid the concrete surroundings. Above one of them, eight blocks of ice, just over half a metre long each are suspended from a lighting rig. Sporadic drips cause ripples in the water below and are reflected across two large screens. The effect is dramatic at first, then gradually calming and intriguing. Unfortunately, the symbolism is never especially sophisticated. Out of Ice gives a strong evocation of polar existence – human and otherwise – but it contributes little that’s new, surprising, or even very thought-provoking. The accompanying programme of events, including a conference entitled Reading and Exhibiting Nature, promise more depth. Out of Ice runs until 9 February at Ambika P3, London. Tom Jeffreys is an art critic and edits the online magazine The Learned Pig
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24945-artistic-tales-of-earths-two-thawing-poles/
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