Fruitmarket in Edinburgh is showing an exhibition of sculpture, drawing and photography by Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin, whose art seeks to bring geological time to a human scale – ‘to map the incomprehensible vastness of geological time and the natural world through the knowable familiarity of human experience.’
Taking as a starting-point her experience of heating-up milk in a saucepan over a hot sulphur spring in Iceland, Halperin is inspired by the idea of bringing the vast and incomprehensible scale of geology into the everyday human experience. She describes the milk-warming as ‘waiting for all the layers of geological time and activity to make their way up to the surface to the point where it’s humanly viable to connect with it. With as little mediation as possible’.
On realising that she was born the same year as the Eldfell volcano off the coast of Iceland, she has mapped the timeline of her life onto that of the volcano, and has celebrated her 30th, 40th, 50th and 51st birthdays alongside it, developing a considerable body of work as she went, including watercolours, drawings, text that comprise the exhibition, alongside small sculptures made with material given to her by the volcano: crystals, a pair of agates and a ‘lava bomb’.
This way of matching her life with the volcano’s life has been a way of speeding-up deep time, reflected in several sculptures, including a collaboration to ‘grow’ sculptures with the calcifying springs at Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint-Nectaire in France’s and a new rock cycle made with Scottish fossils and marble, and Herkimer quartz crystals from New York.
Admission is free. On 25th March at 6:30pm Ilana will be in conversation with Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley to discuss the exhibition and the publication of a new accompanying book.
From 7th March, Where we meet land: environment and ecology in artists’ moving image will be showing in the Fruitmarket’s Warehouse space – an exhibition of moving-images concerned with how humans meet the natural environment, by artists Fergus Carmichael, Olivia Priya Foster, Onyeka Igwe, Rachel McBrinn & Alison Scott, Helen McCrorie, Kadeem Oak & Jonn Gale, Hanna Tuulikki.
