Cape Farewell
I watched a great documentary last week called ‘Art from the Arctic’ on BBC FOUR a week ago or so, which was about the Cape Farewell expeditions to the Arctic. This is a very laudable effort to bring together artists, scientists and educators to create work that will inform the public about the dangers of global warming. In the programme, they followed the latest voyage of the lovely Dutch schooner ‘The Noorderlicht’ to Svalbard.
It was fascinating to see how the artists (including visual and sound artists, a choreographer, a novelist, photographers and an architect) responded to their environment at Svalbard. Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey created some lovely playful sculptures out of ice, trying to make a camera with an ice lens, and another huge ice lens that could burn paper (it didn’t, in the end, but was very beautiful). Antony Gormley and the architect Peter Clegg made a triptych of sculptures based on the volume of carbon consumed over the average person’s lifetime. There was a coffin-like crypt, a standing box and a cave, all made from blocks of compacted snow like an igloo.
Max Eastley works with kinetic sound, and made some amazing sound sculptures from hollow, flute-like pipes, strings and so on, that made really eerie sounds in the wind. David Buckland (the organiser of the expedition) made a rather moving piece in which the image of a naked, pregnant woman walking was projected on to a bank of fog. It was ghostly and the woman’s image looked so fragile and vulnerable in that freezing landscape, and yet also paradoxically strong.
One weakness of the documentary was that we didn’t get to hear from the scientists on the voyage. We saw them looking down microscopes and trawling plankton nets in the water, but they didn’t get a chance to explain what they were doing. That was a shame, because it struck me as the artists talked about their work that there are a lot of similarities between the ways that artists and scientists work, and very similar motivations. They play, experiment, think about why things do or don’t work, test things and above all, think about how to answer the question posed—-all very similar to the kinds of processes that scientists go through.
Michèle Noach (who describes herself as an ‘artoonist’ as far as I remember) made an interesting comment while they were watching big chunks fall off a glacier. She said that she found it interesting that they were all here to try to inform people about global warming, and thereby perhaps do something about it, and yet when they were watching the glacier, they couldn’t help cheering every time a big chunk of ice fell dramatically into the sea. I didn’t catch her exact words, but her point was that the whole problem of humans was more or less encapsulated in that one observation: we are intelligent enough to grasp the fact that we are damaging the Earth, but we just can’t help poking things out of curiosity to see what will happen.
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We're all doomed Captain Mainwaring, doomed I tell you, doomed, doomed.
by Jonathan Briggs @ 26/02/2006 11:02 pm • Permalink •
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This sounds like a good documentary. Are any bits of it online anywhere?----- the global warming paradox - nothing is going to be done about it until something truly catastrophic happens by which time it will be too late to do anything about it
by geoff seago @ 26/02/2006 11:03 pm • Permalink •
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There was a great outdoor exhibition of art here in Oxford by the Cape Farewell artists. Being on a freezing cold November (if I remember correctly) night added to the atmosphere! I was particularly taken by some big suspended blocks of ice slowly melting (ah - it can't have been quite freezing then, upon reflection) and dropping their burden of gravel upon thin metal sheets with microphones attached and plumbed through a PA. All presented in the courtyard of the Sheldonian theatre. Oxford is an ever-better place for the art lover, I'm pleased to report.
by jim w @ 27/02/2006 1:03 am • Permalink •
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Milan: I don't know, but I doubt it. There are some pictures of some of the artworks on the Cape Farewell website I linked to (if you can wade through the Flash).
geoff seago: I'm rather afraid that might be true.
Jonathan Briggs: Yes. We are.
jim w: That sounds lovely---I would have like to see that.
by bsag @ 28/02/2006 7:03 pm • Permalink •
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Hi, great write up. The documentary is called 'Cape Farewell - Art from a Changing Arctic'. It's been shown on BBC a few times and also internationally. There aren't any clips from it up online at the moment, but there is a DVD of the show (and related book) that you can get from Cape Farewell at http://www.capefarewell.com/dvd.htm
Also there is some great footage, images and clips up to watch online from the recent 2007 voyages to the arctic; the Youth Voyage to Svalbard and an Arts/Science Voyage that crossed the Greenland Sea from Svalbard to the remote East coast of Greenland. Check them out at: http://voyage4.capefarewell.com/ and http://voyage5.capefarewell.com/
by Kathy Barber @ 20/01/2008 2:31 pm • Permalink •
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