Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin’s retrospective exhibition What is Us and What is Earth is currently on display at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket. The exhibition showcases sculpture, watercolour, drawing, writing, and photography, and, as Halperin explains, ‘brings together 27 years of thinking, making, and travelling, into one space.’
Walking through the exhibition is not just about viewing the artworks displayed across the lower and upper galleries; it’s about witnessing the life of an artist, her years of love and compassion for the earth as it is: a connection is established with the viewer and the artist through her sincere voice in texts and notes she took on the timelines.
The title of the show comes from a question she has been exploring throughout her life. For her, the boundary between the two ‘is very fine’. Her earliest understanding of this connection came in her teenage years, when she was trained as a stone carver: she often used off-cuts of alabaster – a soft, translucent mineral, fleshy, pink, and heavily veined. The fact that alabaster glows pink when held against the sun, just as our ears would, and that its veins resemble human veins, made her think of this connection.
In 2003, she learned that the Icelandic volcano Eldfell was born in 1973, just like herself. She celebrated her 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays with it, and in one of her drawing texts, she promises to celebrate all significant birthdays together with Eldfell, acknowledging that she won’t be here one day but, ‘Eldfell will go from a human time scale, 30 years old, 40 years old, to a geological timescale – 150, 1000, 800 million years old.’
Since being told by a scientist that tectonic movements are as slow as a human nail grows, she enjoys ‘thinking of a volcanic life and a human life in the same timeframe’, and notes significant events of both human and volcanic life on the same timeline. This connection is reflected in the exhibition not only in groups of watercolours and text drawings, but also in rock and mineral samples from Eldfell.
An Anatomy of Mars is another work in which she continues to explore this deep connection. The work emphasises that Mars is a planetary sibling to the Earth; with its iron content, it’s red, just like our blood. According to Halperin, thinking about Mars can also help us understand ourselves and our relationships with one another. 18 watercolours were inspired by her virtual trip to Mars, which left her in tears.
‘I like the idea of being very present,’ Halperin says, and photography enables her to do just that. In the lower galleries, we see analogue photographs from the field that she has been capturing since 1999, from Iceberg City in East Greenland to Etna in Sicily. These encounters are displayed together for the first time. One of the photographs from Field Encounters, titled Meeting on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, shows two pairs of bare feet on the rocks. Halperin describes the background of the photo, taken during the summer of 1999, in her first artist residency in Iceland: ‘…I also asked my friend to join me at a deep fissure along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. As she is from Belgium, I asked her to stand on the Eurasian tectonic plate while I stood on the North American side – this became Meeting on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.’
Another photograph from 1999 welcomes us in the upper galleries. We see Halperin heating milk in a small saucepan over a hot sulphur spring in Iceland. Regardless of the context, the photograph immediately attracts attention with its tranquil blues of the misty scenery and appealing red of Halperin’s jacket. The story behind the photograph is detailed in the book accompanying the exhibition. Halperin, in a letter to Candice Chung and Adam Bobbette, explains how Icelanders use warm geothermal water, yet they detach from the process and forget the ‘direct line reaching from below the earth’s crust to one’s cupped hands.’ She continues: ‘So I went to a local hardware store in Akureyri, bought a small pan and some milk. Then I went to Mývatn, crouched at the edge of a boiling hot geothermal pool, and waited to see the milk start to simmer. I asked a friend to join me and, eventually, to take a picture.’
Psychal Geology is a piece made from eight limestone segments. Resembling a carved sculpture, it was actually formed at Fontaine Pétrifiante de Saint-Nectaire, over nine months using a unique technique. Halperin combined two copper-plate etchings, collaborating with a 3D modeller to redraw every element, and sent the model into the caves. They created a natural rubber mould from the model, and the deposit grew completely within the cave casts over nine months. ‘The mould, created by Halperin, depicts an imagined trace fossil of some ancient microorganism, recording traces of life, air bubbles and tracks.’
One of her latest works, The rock cycle (from stromatolites to diamonds), was also formed in the same caves. ‘Herkimer diamonds in beds of dolostone, encrusted in a new layer of limestone over four months in the calcifying springs.’
With thanks to Omur Sahin Keyif (Insta: @theartsreporter) for this review.
