This project, which I learned about at an exhibit at the Pier Art Center in Stromness, Orkney, is provocative and a different way to think about issues of climate change in connection with long-term natural changes in the landscape.

How do individuals and communities understand Deep Time? A relatively short-term perspective is dominant in contemporary societies as they face the complicated ongoing consequences of landscape change on every aspect of the human life, from agriculture and provision of food and energy to the protection of natural or cultural landscapes. A more holistic and deeper knowledge is required.
 
http://www.cire.group.cam.ac.uk/Orkney
 
Orkney: Beside the Ocean of Time
The action of the sea is constantly reshaping and reducing the islands of Orkney, eroding the glacial till and the underlying sandstone. A continuous gnawing, but with moments of drama that thrust deep time into the full glare of consciousness.
At what temporal resolution should we view human activity? In order to understand the processes of change that shape the landforms under our feet and the resources upon which we depend, we need to think beyond the short-term time-horizons of rapid economic transactions and electoral cycles – the days, months or even years of human time. Yet, if we attempt to place human activity against the backdrop of Deep Time – the vast and gradual time-scale of Earth’s geological history – the temporal span of a human life almost disappears. This presents Science and Humanities scholars with a conceptual challenge. In attempting to understand how communities respond and adapt to landscape change, we need to understand the factors that shape attitudes and behaviour, and the present-day, immediate context in which people narrate their lives. Yet understanding change also requires a deeper time perspective, one that recognises long-term histories of human settlement, in the context of deep time ecological and geomorphological transformations. With short-term time horizons, the understanding of the places where we live can only be in relation to a single point in environmental history; as such we risk locking ourselves into single point assumptions. If we expand our time horizons, recognising environmental fluctuation, we will increase communities’ resilience to landscape change. How, then, might thinking with a Deep Time perspective destabilise present-day certainties, and how might researchers work together to expand the time-depth of their work while remaining sensitive to the temporality of human experience?
This project brings together perspectives from Social Anthropology, Literature, Archaeology, Palaeoecology, and Geology, working in collaboration with Orcadian artist Anne Bevan and our project partner, The Pier Arts Centre, to find innovative ways to investigate and represent time-depth in landscape, using Orkney as a model. The project will develop and pilot an interdisciplinary methodology that will enable new insights into Orkney’s rich literary, geological, palaeoenvironmental and archaeological heritage, which is coupled with contemporary concerns over coastal erosion and the political and economic importance of energy generation.
 
Research Questions:
1)      How do communities respond and adapt to landscape change?
2)      What is the time-depth of people’s engagement with place?
3)      How do we make deep time visible?

 Artists Re_Solve
Artists ReSolve addresses the divisions intensifying in the United States and brought into focus by the recent presidential election. The site gives artists– writers, dancers, visual artists, performers, composers, etc.– a platform to connect and collaborate in response to the current environment. Working with another person through a creative process can spark curiosity, critique, and new re_solutions towards a common good.
Artists Resolve put out a call to artists who wanted to respond to the current political situation by collaborating with another artist.  It seemed like a good opportunity to engage with someone outside my usual circle and to use art in a more direct political statement. 
I responded to their solicitation to collaborate and was paired with the wonderful story teller,  poet, and teacher who lives in Hawaii, yet  travels the world sharing her knowledge, passions and good vibes,  Kimberly Dark. 
We spoke by phone and she sent me three poems that I would interpret visually.  I had at first thought that it would be fun and politically relevant to do a joint online action in support of Planned Parenthood.  My wish was to find a way to invite people to donate to the organization and 'honor' Mike Pence who supported a nefarious bill that would defund Planned Parenthood and used his position to break a tie in the Senate. 

 I responded to their solitation to collaborate and was paired with the wonderful story teller,  poet, and teacher who travels the world sharing her knowledge, passions and good vibes., Kimberly Dark. 
We spoke by phone and she sent me three poems that I would interpret visually.  I had at first thought that it would be fun and politically relevant to do a joint online action in support of Planned Parenthood.  My wish was to find a way to invite people to donate to the organization and 'honor' Vice President Mike Pense who had just broken a tie in the Senate, in support of a nefarious bill that would defund Planned Parenthood.

When I received the poems, I chose this one. It spoke to me of the way in which beauty is made significant when it becomes part of collective action-- in this case political action. 

My thinking about the poem and imagery.
how could your loveliness matter?
Become part of the sparkling crowd.
By becoming engaged, joining with others, being part of humankind, by acting. 
And here I took the liberty of deciding to act on behalf of Planned Parenthood, both because Mike Pence had just broke the tie and it was being unfunded, And because the poem seemed to be about women, about you and me, and us. AND I wanted to use pink in the piece, a color that I almost never use in my work about water and land, with earth and azure colors. 
Your action is part of you when you engage with others, like breathing, but takes work (sweating pretty)
Placing your beauty –- into the humming, chaotic, breathing earth, stormy
I envisioned the sea as a chaotic hurricane – the background images are of hurricane Sandy, which hit the East coast two years ago. And from another storm in the oceans.
The individual self is small (irrelevant, insignificant) and doesn’t mean much in the scheme of things -- nature, the universe, however it’s defined, but becomes meaningful in action, commitment.
resplendent in my insignificance.  I changed the last line to 'resplendent ...[in] significance'

                                        Kimberly and I submitted our collaboration to Artists Resolve. 

I am very excited about my return to Iceland in September to work with Elva and Soffia at Hvitahús for a week.  We will continue to expand our collaboration and talk about how to make visible aspects of global warming.  Elva sent me 3 images of other panels from our collabotative piece, Horizon. She and I talked this morning about dates for my residency with her.

                       Elements like this would be included as part of a large wall that I hope we will create together.

Inga Þórey, our curator placed our work: My 3-dimensional collages at one end to the left as you entered the gallery, Soffia's large charcoal  drawings on the long wall, her scrolls in a vitrine  Elva's prints next to Soffia's drawings and toward the far end where, in a recess, Inga installed our collaborative piece.  Two short walls, perpendicular to the window wall, the vitrine and a pedestal broke up the space and added rhythm.

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Above and Below the Horizon
Soffia, like many island inhabitants, is focused on the horizon and in much of her painting work, she places herself on the ground looking directly out. This puts her and us in a strong and solid place vis a vis our surroundings. When Soffia became interested in Marie Tharp's maps of the ocean floor, she first drew this underwater vision as a journey-story on scrolls, where one can imagine a small Soffia traveling across under water to Places Unknown.  Only a part of the story is visible, the rest is rolled up.  The position of the artist and the ‘reader’ is on the bottom of the sea looking out as if, even here, we are looking at a horizon.  In powerful charcoal drawings, Hidden Landscapes , our sea bed exploration is enlarged to life size.

While Soffia stands and looks; Elva sits down to touch and feel the earth's crust.  Elva pays close attention to the surface of the earth: the textures and lines of lava fields, mosses, and rocks in her homeland. She conveys them in lovely evocative prints. Often the images are small honing in on a microscopic detail; while in the series of six larger collographs Written By Nature, our view is expanded.  Elva uses elements from the earth to create her matrices, adhering sand and other material to her metal plates.  Inspired by our collaboration, she asked me to bring sand from Cape Cod so that she could use the sand from the Reykjanes peninsula and sand from across the sea on the New England Coast.  In this way, her work and mine reference each other in nuanced ways.   Four of Elva's small collographic plates were exhibited on a pedestal allowing visitors to the exhibit to see and understand her process.
       
FOR WRITING ON MY WORK, SEE PREVIOUS POST

Our opening reception on November 11 was well attended.  A local painter had an exhibit in another gallery at the museum and a cultural award was given to a choirmaster from Keflavik where the museum is located.  Before the galleries were opened a folk group played, we were all introduced, and a youth choir sang.  There were between 500-600 people in the museum that evening.

 Two days later Elva, Sofia, and I gave talks about our work to an audience of 30+ people, more than usually attend I was told.  I spoke first in English, the two Icelandic artists in Icelandic and then in English Soffia and I talked about our collaboration.  There were questions asked and much interest in our work.  I was introduced to a friend of Elva's a geologist who was interested in my work about Reykjanes and shared her knowledge of the relationship between the geothermal plant and the changes taking place in Gunnuhiver.  I have to get in touch with her to continue that dialogue.  The museum produced a beautiful catalogue with a CV and four pages of images for each artist, images from our collaboration, and distance shots of the installations in the museum.  We received national attention.  On November 11, the morning of our opening an article with photographs about our show was published in the Morgenbladid.  We were featured on the nightly news on November 22  www.ruv.is/sarpurinn/ruv/tiufrettir/20161122
And the university website had a long review of the exhibit. 
All this was wonderful, but most important is that I have two friends for life.

 This installation was not  completed until It was hung in the museum.  I needed to see what space it would occupy and how I wanted it to look in situ.  I knew that I wanted the piece to hang away from the wall with the more abstract elements (as above) further away from the wall than the elements that showed location.  I chose to use magnets on steel screws of different dimensions to create a sense of movement.  Receiving advice from friends Gene Turitz and David Martin, i attached washers and small discs to the back of the pieces.  These discs  lined  up with the screws on which we put small strong magnets.  Teddi, who helped me install this piece on the second day, had fun with the process so we both had fun. The piece is called Undertow: Cape Cod.  I consider it a work-in-progress and will show it in different configurations in the future.  One opportunity will be in the Inside/Out gallery run by the Somerville Art Council in June 2017.  The image below shows the wall at the museum with Undertow: Cape Cod.

I knew what the installation, Reykjanes: Gunnuhiver's Ghost, would look like before it left my studio.  It was to be a tryptich and I had had planned very carefully, the spacing between the three sections and the depth of earth's crust that I wanted to express.  I  bought screws of 1", 2.5", 3", and 4" so that the volatility of the geothermal landscape it refered to would be felt by those looking at the piece.  It was, as installed, also about 10 ft across.  It was much harder to install and was frustrating to Halli who was helping me.  Because the sections were heavier than that of Undertow, I had over-estimated how many magnets and screws would be needed.  I'd been encouraged to hang it as if it might be jostled or pushed by visitors to the museum, so was over-careful.    I had pushed myself to create work of greater complexity and size than I usually do. That I chose to do this under a deadline was something I have to re-think for the future,  I was quite stressed in the months leading up to October when I had to ship the work to Iceland.  But the reason I keep doing what I do is because I like to challenge myself and continue to develop new ideas and new ways of expressing thse ideas.   In the end, the stress was worth it.
This piece was greatly admired and  I felt successful. Gunnuhiver's Ghost has been acquired by the museum.  It couldn't be in a more appropriate collection. 
                  
                                                                              

I'm excited about the work Elva, Soffia, and I started together (see last post) and want to make it my own. For now I'm taking a break from sculptural collages to work on expanding our collaborative piece, creating mixed media prints, painting & drawing into and onto the prints. I'm looking forward to seeing where this will take me intellectually and aesthetically. I want to bring back text, graphs, equations into my work. And research into global warming effect on oceans and the sea floor.
review.pdf

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