Bonhoga Gallery, Weisdale, Shetland, until 18 November 2007

Icelandic born/ Norwegain-based artist Málfríur Aalsteinsdóttir.

SPITSBERGEN’S icy bulk has fascinated me since I was ten. A relative spent several years there with Captain Frank Wild around 1918. He was on board the ELLA, initially under Ernest Shackleton’s leadership.

My relative bequeathed me the letters that he had written to his mother back in Aberdeen. In his quirky manner he recites tales of daily life, of husky dogs and strange diets, of the weather, the midnight sun and of course, polar bears.

Whilst I have made it to The Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society in Hammerfest, Spitsbergen has to date eluded me. I am a fairly intrepid traveller but this was surely one for scientists, explorers, yachtsfolk and wealthy cruise liner passengers. Not so it seems – there are ways and means for artists too.

Artists’ residences now take place in various parts of the archipelago and Icelandic born/ Norwegain-based artist Málfríur Aalsteinsdóttir has made two trips north. During April 2005 and August 2007 she was based in a hut at Ny Ålesund on Spitsbergen’s west coast. It lies nearly 79 degrees north.

The photographs currently on show at the Bonhoga Gallery are the result of these trips. There are framed photographs on the walls and a looping laptop showing around one hundred more. They are stunning images.

There is a titanium sheen on everything as the extraordinary arctic light bounces off the snow and ice. A natural world but one of somewhat metallic greens, pinks and blues. There are twisted, layered mountains, vast ice fields, crawling glaciers and minisucle ice crystals.

Spitsbergen is part of the archipelago of Svalbard. It lies far within the Arctic Circle and the sun is above the horizon for twenty four hours a day from late April to late August.

During her first residency in April Aalsteinsdóttir was able to witness and record the last sunsets of the year. On her return two years later, this time in August, she saw the sun rise again. It is the striking effect of changing light on ice that makes this exhibtion so alluring.

“It is all about the light on this beautiful, white, frozen land,” Aalsteinsdóttir explains. The photographs feel cold. What, then, of the technical challenges of working in this enivronment, in these temperatures: “I just had to keep my camera inside my clothes, the batteries can be affected in this cold weather, but mine were ok, other people’s weren’t but mine were. My hands got very cold.”

The exhibition is also intended to document the dramatic changes to the landscape between 2005 and 2007. Great tracts of ice that had been there in 2005 had simply gone when Aalsteinsdóttir returned two years later.

A pencil-written text on the wall of the gallery explains:

At the end of September 2005 the world got a shock: never before had the ice cover around the North Pole been so small. The additional area from 2005 that melted this summer is comparable with the land masses of Norway, Sweden, Great Britian and Belgium.

All around Spitsbergen the ice did not return. Whilst we watched the looping photographs I asked the inevitable, sceptical, question: isn’t this just the natural ebb and flow of the climate over the years, hasn’t this happened before?

“Yes, it has happened before, but never two years in a row.” At this point an image of lumps of ice pops up on the laptop screen “This is the last ice seen in the fjord,” Aalsteinsdóttir states. It is an ominous statement and like seeing a photograph of an extinct animal.

She cites the dramatic wild fires seen recently in, for example, the USA and Greece as one of the many reasons for the changes. “The ash rises and congregates over the Pole. It falls on the ice and contributes to the melting.”

Is this exhibition a hommage to natural beauty or a warning? “Both. I just want people to look and think it’s beautiful. Is it really disappearing? I want them to see how fantastic and spectacular it is and to stop, think and do something.”

I imagined Aalsteinsdóttir in these enormous landscapes. Tiny against the utter vastness around her. She travelled in small boats, ships and kayaks. She walked and skied, rode snow mobiles and sledges. She was often alone in this extraordinary place.

And there was the constant danger of the polar bears. She had to carry a gun with her at all times. “There’s me with my gun,” she says matter-of-factly as she appears wrapped up in arctic gear on the screen in front of us.

The framed photographs are titled by numbers, there is no description of where we are or what exactly we are seeing. I did want to know more and there is not a great deal of interpretation. Fortunately, the artist was beside me to explain.

‘Spitsbegren XI’ is taken from on board a ship. It records the ice breaking up and melting, small chunks and slush are floating in the fjord. The ice is now gone.

Whilst, in Shetland, we are familiar with the noctural delights of the ‘Simmer Dim’, a period in mid-Summer where there is no true darkness, to learn that many of the photographs were taken at midnight, or at one or two in the morning is delightfully tricky to comprehend. Bright sunlight shimmers on the ice against a radiant blue sky.

In several of the photographs it is hard to discern the size of what can be seen. Lumps of jade green or vivid blue ice could be enormous cliffs or frozen chunks on a macro scale. There are no people or recognisable objects, nothing to give a sense of scale. It is disorienting but all the more alluring for it.

There are hints of humans. ‘Spitsbergen IV’ is composed almost entirely of wind-sculpted snow. However, peeping out behind this white mass are the tops of wooden houses and huts. The only evidence of human presence in the exhibition? Not if Aalsteinsdóttir, and indeed the scientists she lived amongst, are correct.

If they are correct then the very subject matter itself, the shrinking ice, is evidence of human beings. Of human beings hundreds of miles away inadvertantly sculpting a distant landscape.

Some of the beauty is almost grotesque. The glacial ice looks like stumps of rotten teeth pitted with cracks and hollows. There is a slushy dirtiness as mud is caught up in the melting snow and newly formed rivers emerge from beneath the ice. Sulphuric blue and coral coloured cracks appear as light and ice combine, reflect and dazzle.

‘Spitsbergen I’ is a landscape photograph of recognisable scale. Its centre is dominated by a mountain. The layers of twisted rock are emphasised by the snow that lies on the jagged ledges. And in the foreground a glacier. Blue, cold and grinding.

Photography does not record sound, the cracking and heaving of the bulky glaciers or indeed the silence of a snowy plain. Nor does it convey the sense of being surrounded, enveloped by the sheer immensity of the landscape. That is reserved for the senses of those who make it there. In these photographs it is light and shape that dominate.

I leave perplexed. Stunned by the photographs, delighted by the artist and even more desperate to go to Spitsbergen. But what about my carbon shoes and global footprints. Is it precisely the exploration born from such curiousity that ultimately does for a place?

How have past explorers and prospectors affected this place, my relative for example. Conflicting mineral and strategic claims continue to dog this part of the world. Aalsteinsdóttir intends to return. Will the ice return? We’ll no doubt know soon enough.

© Karen Emslie, 2007

Links

• More pictures from the Arctic Land exhibition