Arctic wind

An earlier entry (Ice Lens) described the Cape Farewell project, which has now arrived at the Natural History Museum as The Ship: The Art of Climate Change. One of the artists in this exhibition, Gautier Deblonde, has made a series of landscape photographs of Svalbard (the archipelago that includes Spitsbergen). His website has a range of these images, some of which are quite striking, like this photograph of a flock of birds.

There is an article about the Cape Farewell trip on the Open Democracy site. It includes a sound recording made by Max Eastley of the Arctic wind: “moderated through Aeolian flutes (simple tubes strapped to the rigging of the schooner Noorderlicht)”. At the Natural History Museum, Eastley has installed a kinetic sculpture which taps out sounds on ice-like blocks of glass.

It will be interesting to see the afterlife of the exhibition in these artists’ work. Was this a stimulating holiday from their normal subjects, allowing Gary Hume to paint a polar bear and Antony Gormley to cast himself in ice, for example, or will the Cape Farewell artists continue to draw attention to global warming and the plight of the Arctic?