Ilulissat, Greenland

As part of the major project launched by Elizabeth Ogilvie to highlight International Polar Year [IPY], five MFA Art Space & Nature students from Edinburgh College of Art visited Ilulissat, Greenland. IPY highlights the Polar Regions with science, meteorology, anthropology, and art projects being carried out by teams throughout the world. In Britain, The British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, has selected this and other projects. As part of Ogilvie’s project a permanent polar/arctic research and field trip is being established for ASN Masters programme with its base at Ilulissat.

Ilulissat means icebergs in Greenlandic. In 2004 Ilulissat Icefjord was admitted onto UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Located on northwest coast of Greenland, 250-km north of Arctic Circle, Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord is the sea mouth of Sermeq Kujalleq, one of few glaciers through which Greenland ice cap reaches sea. It is one of fastest most active glaciers in world. Studied for over 250 years, it has significantly added to our knowledge of ice-cap glaciology, climate change, related geomorphic processes.

‘I selected these five outstanding young artists to accompany me on the first research trip to Ilulissat in May 2008. While we all had a personal agenda, it was also our objective to explore the regions intellectually, meditating on these sublime territories through direct observation. Equipped with camera/video camera, drawing materials and extremely protective clothing, we spent much of our research time on a small charter boat amid icebergs and frozen seas.
Time expanded in the constant light, allowing us to work around the clock and to contemplate this vast, silent whitescape. The tallest icebergs towered over us at a height equivalent to a 15-storey building. Many are the proportions of a small town. Light behaves differently around the icebergs somehow adding to their dimension and to our awe. On land, also, the daily life of the small community existing in these remote, severe conditions filled us with admiration. It was altogether a very moving experience.
‘How can language grip a landscape so close-toned, which specialises in “great, unrelieved stretches of snow and ice” and “plains of open water”? How to describe a place whose immensity and capacity for self-replication is peerless?’ These are the challenges that the young artists in this exhibition have faced.’

Elizabeth Ogilvie July 2008