Earlier this year, British artist David Buckland led his third “Cape Farewell” expedition of artists, writers and scientists to the Svalbard archipelago, high up in the Arctic Circle. In Norwegian Svalbard means “cold edge”, but this cluster of islands is fast losing its icy mantle. Glaciers are collapsing; ice that once packed in tight around the mountainous land bobs in insubstantial clumps out at sea. The water temperature is rising twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth. Buckland’s purpose was to enable expedition members to witness both the sublime beauty of the Arctic and the damage climate change is inflicting on the region - and to encourage them to create an artistic response to their findings.
Despite endless column inches devoted to the Kyoto agreement and carbon trading, Buckland feels that global warming still hasn’t truly entered the public consciousness. But what does he think art can do that newspapers can’t?
“We have to make the argument for change more emotional,” he says. “Art can make the issue of climate change inspirational and exciting. It can raise the question - do we really want to lose the Arctic, with all its beauty and diversity?”
The project’s website, www.capefarewell.com, recently won an international “e-science” award for its content, the result of seven years of campaigning, fund-raising and expeditions on Buckland’s part. Making people more aware of climate change has become his mission, and he has many big names on board already.
Artists including Rachel Whiteread, Gary Hume, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, Antony Gormley and Alex Hartley have all spent time sailing around Svalbard with Buckland on the two-masted Noorderlicht. They have endured sub-zero temperatures and frostbite to walk the Arctic terrain and make works that directly or indirectly comment on its rapidly changing landscape. Many of their pieces will be included in a planned series of exhibitions, organised by Buckland, that begins in December in Oxford and will culminate in a show at London’s Natural History Museum next summer.
Ackroyd and Harvey are “crystallising” a whale’s skeleton for the Natural History Museum show. “Whales and dolphins seem to bring about a strong feeling in people,” they say, “as they have suffered terrible exploitation over the last century and a half.” The twinkling bones, covered in crystals, represent the loss of Arctic diversity; through contemplation of the work, Ackroyd and Harvey want us to face up to our responsibilities. “How do you validate something you are losing?” they continue. “You have to talk in emotional terms. What does it mean for us to lose whales? Or polar bears? It really matters to us that polar bears have a place in our world. Their fate is in our hands now, and we have a huge responsibility.”
Ackroyd and Harvey took casts of the polar bear prints they found around the ship and are creating artworks from them. Gormley - who also went on the latest expedition and, together with the architect Peter Clegg, made snow sculptures based on the amount of space occupied by a kilogram of carbon dioxide - explains that they saw real signs of climate change in what was happening to the polar bears: “The ice in Tempelfjorden, where the Noorderlicht was moored, formed very late, and the evidence we had was that the polar bears were quite hungry, not having been able to feed at the seal ice-holes as they would usually.”
Alex Hartley has created a work that specifically addresses the shrinking ice cap. He is in the process of officially naming an island that previously didn’t exist. “It has come out of the glacier in the last two years,” he says. “The last charts were done in 1969 and 1980 and it is well within the glacier on both of those.” He is launching an architecture competition to see what proposals arise for the tiny island.
Buckland doesn’t force any of the artists to make overtly educational art, but instead reasons that if the issues of the warming Arctic infiltrate each artist’s working practice, and if they each create something relevant that encourages the public to emotionally engage, the consequences of climate change will seep into their consciousness.
Rachel Whiteread - another Cape Farewell participant - unveiled her Arctic-infused installation “Embankment” at Tate Modern last month, which will be seen by some two million visitors while it is on display there. She has said of the piece, made up of 14,000 white plastic boxes, “I’m hoping that one of the things you get from ‘Embankment’ is a real intake of breath. I walked in the Arctic, and I’m hoping there’ll be a sense of that there, a sort of sublime whiteness.” After its six-month run, the plastic boxes will be ground down and recycled. “Embankment” will exist only as a memory. And as a metaphor for the disappearing ice cap, no politician’s speech or scientist’s report can match it.
“The Ice Garden”, an installation inspired by the Cape Farewell project, is at the Clarendon Quad, Bodleian Library, Oxford, December 15-18.
