Entanglement with a Lava Bubble, digital photograph, 2022
Entanglement with a Lava Bubble and Entanglement with a Tectonic Rift are two of the works that came out of a month spent in Iceland travelling with the vulcanologist Simon Matthews of the University of Iceland. Over this month a series of interactions and entanglements were made with the fabric of the Earth’s crust, and the gasses and liquids emerging from its fissures.
Entanglement with a Tectonic Rift shows a body braced between the diverging tectonic plates of North America and Europe.
Entanglement with a Lava Bubble shows a body curled into the negative space of a solidified bubble within a cold lava-flow.
Entanglement with a Tectonic Rift, digital photograph, 2022
A further work was the action: Collaboration with a Volcano (frying eggs for a vulcanologist) – where the heat of newly erupted lava was used to prepare breakfast for a vulcanologist.
Collaboration with a Volcano (frying eggs for a vulcanologist), two digital photographs, 2022
‘Sampling The Breath of an Island’ is a video-work that combines a series of actions made whilst encountering the active, volcanic landscape of Iceland. The video’s images are all shot on location on the island, but the soundtrack of the film is created entirely from sound samples of the artist’s breath – woven together to create an imagined soundscape for a volcanic body.
“At the timescales that humans live within, landscapes feel like passive backgrounds. Rolling hills or flat plains seem like static material over which we roam – spaces against which the actions of our lives take place. We speed over them, we dig into them, we build our cities incrementally across them. They seem to be inert arenas for our agency and extraction. But stumbling across the folds and fissures of Iceland, is to feel the thinness of the Earth’s living skin. Iceland, like the Earth itself, is a creature busily remaking herself in fire. In the timescales of geology, Iceland is a young beast. Hissing out steam and deathly gasses. A creature that vomits up its liquid insides through sudden, iridescent mouths. A belching, burning thing born of the depths. A pregnant, shuddering disaster that heaves and splits along a great fault-line. Here, directly beneath my feet, I can feel the boiling guts of our planet, and sense (even in my human timescale), that ‘landscape’ is a process not a background.”
