Norway inside
By Rebecca Haseltine
(c) 09/30/18
Please check out my ‘News’ section for more photographs of the magic world around Sognefjord and Hardangarfjord in Norway. Cheryl Leonard and I were awarded a residency at KH Messen in Ålvik for June this year. We spent as much time as possible hiking in the area around the residency. We picked Ålvik because it was a small town on a fjord, near many hiking trails into mountains behind, and it was near the two largest glaciers in Norway. We both have a keen interest in glaciers – as endangered species and as a cross between water and rock, between geology and hydrology, a record of planet and local history, and keeper of deep resources.
We hiked up the Nigardsbreen glacier with a guide and Cheryl was able to drop her waterproof microphones into holes and crevasses to record the deep sounds there. I was too overwhelmed to draw but photographed as much as I could. I now have a more visceral sense of the movement of glaciers, as evidenced by the cracks and crumbles the ice makes. And we could hear the sounds of melting ice – in crackles and pops and in the burbling of under-surface streams.
I was given a large studio to work in, and immediately filled the floors, wall, and space with experiments. I spent a lot of time crumpling paper, trying to exert different forces on a sheet of paper that might force it to crumble the way a glacier does when it is undergoing different pressures and strains. The resulting paper sculptures began to fill my studio, and they came alive in the changing light of the days. I started making my own ice blobs in the freezer and then shined different kinds of light through the ice to photograph and video.
Ice crumpling as glacier rounds a bend, Nigardsbreen.
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I was intimidated by the relentless, raw beauty surrounding us, and making art felt trivial and pointless. But I felt an obligation to at least try, so I experimented a lot with different materials. I continue to unravel the inspiration and will try to share something of the visceral experience of being in the place. This is life as it lives inside. Norway lives inside.
The ice eventually melted and all the paper sculptures got flattened and rolled up for some future artist to use for something else. In the basement of Messen is a room full of artist leftovers that any current resident may use for their projects. We all made many trips to the basement to search for interesting and useful things and to deposit what we no longer needed.
The entire landscape, (I hesitate to use that word because places in nature are not just for us to gaze upon. Places in nature are for themselves, and I want a word that honors that. ‘Environment’ is so generic.) the land, is shaped by glaciers. There is also a dramatic geological history of upheaval and shifting that precedes the glacial action, including massive heating and cooling phases. The rocks and the glaciers seemed to be in a direct conversation with each other, and they exerted forces on each other, creating sometimes similar patterns and forms. We were confronted by different time scales as well as the massive volume scale of the geography.
With my familiar ink and mylar tools I attempted to reflect on the deep chasms in the glacial ice, the jumbled hunks of ice of the toe and edges, and the unusual blues, the ever deepening blues emerging from the depths in the ice. Our guide explained that this particular blue is the only wavelength able to pass through the density of the compressed glacial ice.
Cheryl and I are working toward a performance in which I will do something as yet unformed! I hope to work with video projection, working with field-recorded footage woven with live video. Stay tuned!