Bringing it Together

Four years after I first learned of the Nova Zembla prints, my exhibition has opened at the Rijksmuseum.

The installation of the show involved working with a large team from the museum. As the exhibitions there need to be installed when the public is not present, we started at 6.00 in the evening – and finished at 4.00 the next morning!

The process was a complex one. The exhibition includes works demanding very different lighting conditions. This was a huge challenge, especially as the lights are positioned at a great height above the gallery. Lighting a combination of the delicately gilded pages of small-scale vellum bound works, backlit “watermark” drawings in light boxes, pinpricked drawings in tarnished silver and a video piece, together with the distressed books and prints from the Nova Zembla collection, needed very particular skills. Luckily Hans, who was in charge of the lighting, has worked for many years on opera productions. At one point I called up to him, “It’s too warm, we need more ice.” Suddenly the whole space was transformed, taking on the cooler temperature that the works require.

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Another important aspect of the installation of the works, was the journey that one makes through the space, Two flat glass display cabinets, one containing my twenty five vellum bound works and the other containing the song book and pile of fragments of a nautical map found on Nova Zembla, were placed in order to slow down the route through the gallery The video work in one corner of the space also slows the viewer down – it depicts a journey edging little by little through the frozen icepack. Many of the other works take time to take them in; in part due to the way that the light is reflected off or diffused through the surfaces.

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In stark contrast to the slow pace of viewing that is encouraged through the installation and nature of the works, the opening night was filled hundreds of visitors moving through the museum. A wonderful evening that also brought together so many of the people that have been involved in the project. Not only was the event to celebrate my exhibition but also that of a further exhibition of objects from Nova Zembla – which included the clock that had froze during the overwintering months because it was so cold, the letter of farewell left by Willem Barentsz and many of the prints that had been painstakingly reconstructed by Peter Poldervaart. Still more interest in the Nova Zembla story, sprung from the fact that Reinout Oerlemans’ feature film “Nova Zembla” the most expensive and first 3-D film to be made in the Netherlands, had been premiered in Amsterdam two days previously.

Drawings to the Ice

I have now made two visits to Northern Russia to Arkhangelsk where the other main collection of objects found on Nova Zembla is held. Invited by Arkhangelsk Museum and the Dutch Embassy in Moscow, I gave a presentation on the current project with the Rijksmuseum as part of the International Barents Forum, 2011. This brought together scientists, curators, conservators, polar experts and archaeologists. Working with curators and polar experts in Arkhangelsk I aim to explore drawing in relation to sites of refuge and preservation. As part of the development of this new project, three hundred of my small drawings have been taken on board a Russian research vessel and buried in the ice on Nova Zembla. I hope to be able to join an expedition that will retrieve them in 2013. They will form the basis for new works.

On Creativity and Damage

For some years I’ve been interested in the space where creativity and damage meet. This interest has been explored through a number of means. In 2000, during a residency at Villa Romana, Florence, I repetitively burnt finger-print sized ovals out of a series of found letters. The shadows cast through the apertures created a further “drawing” onto a layer on Japanese paper behind. Over the past decade the apertures and indentations created by burning, singeing and piercing through the paper support, have become more and more minute.

"Soundpiece"

At Kyoto Art Centre, Japan, the large-scale installation, “Shift”, consisted of nine works suspended from the ceiling. Images of Japanese paper teahouses being folded and folded, were singed into and through the surface of the semi-translucent paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
The process of pin pricking through paper began during my residency at the V&A, London, in 2006. Backlighting was integral to these pieces, the light revealing the drawing. I also employed laser cutting, another form of burning, another form of damage.

V&A Residency, "Gaze"

For several years, I have been interested in investigating the relationship between the two sides of a drawing. In 2001 a large-scale work, “Soundpiece”, (Jerwood Drawing Prizewinner), was repetitively singed from the underside of the work.  The later installation “Shift”, invited viewers to walk around and between the works. The heavier paper that I’ve been employing for the last two years, means that the pinpricking “damages” or “disturbs” the surface of the paper in a three dimensional manner. The shadows that were cast through the apertures of earlier works, are now cast by indentations out of, or into the paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfinished Business curated by Chris Dorsett at Wallington Hall, Northumberland, is an exhibition that I am currently taking part in. (See: unfinishedbusinessatwallington.weebly.com.)The three drawings that I am showing, explore the hemp paper support as if it were a membrane – with the pierced image emerging out of the paper, on the paper or into the paper.

During the current project, notions of damage are fundamental, both in terms of the models that the Nova Zembla prints provide and the way that my drawings have been made. Detailed drawings of the fragmented icepack reflected in a small mirror were repeatedly pierced through to a layer of paper beneath. The first drawings were therefore “sacrificed” in order to make the new ones. Below are details from the series, “Silent Freeze: Mirrored” that will form part of the forthcoming show. Watermarks of the handwritten navigational guide found on Nova Zembla, also form the ground for these works.

In Progress

The final stage of making the twenty five vellum bound works is now in progress. The approach that I am taking is very open-ended. Images are repeated and retranslated using a range of materials and processes. The work is very time consuming and labour-intensive. The end results engage light and surface in different ways. Images are drawn in response to what already exists in, and on, the pages – that is to say, what I had already drawn, embossed, watermarked or gilded onto the pages before the works were bound.

Each work operates individually. However I am also approaching the process as though each is a composite part of the group as a whole – a large complex drawing so to speak. Themes and images are repeated and revisited by pricking the surface of the paper and dusting powdered tarnished silver and palladium through the pinpricks. Five themes are being explored: journal, journey, refuge, relic, site. Reference material includes documentation of the journey to the site and of the site itself where the Nova Zembla prints were discovered – video stills of the icepack, 17^th century etchings and photographic documentation from 20^th scientific expeditions.

Below are examples of the works in progress:

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 

“Descriptions True and Perfect”, pinpricks and powdered gold, tarnished silver and mica on hemp paper bound with vellum, 2010-11

 

 

Temporary Bindings Again

I wrote in a previous posting that I have been working with Albert Ames, Senior Book Conservator at the Rijksmuseum to develop a series of unique artists books. Through discussions with Albert and Idelette van Leeuwen, Head of Paper Conservation, the twenty-five works have now been bound with a semi-limp vellum binding. The binding and choice of materials is a response to the examples of 16th century temporary bindings that I documented in the earlier posting. The binding is also the “entry point”, both visual and material, to the various modes of drawing on the pages – and which relate to themes of fragmentation, repetition and states of flux.

Albert Ames at work: sewing the quires

Albert has recently retired after some forty years of conserving and binding books at the museum and I am extremely indebted to him for sharing his time and expertise with me in order to develop this part of the project. During a week that I spent with him in the conservation studios I took a series of images which shows the particularity of the work involved in the binding. The overall sense of the works is of great simplicity, which belies the skill and intricacy involved in the process.

Click here to view the complete series of images

The finished work

Through the Pack Ice

Intrigued by the way in which the Nova Zembla prints and books were transformed through their time locked for centuries in the ice, I decided to make the journey into the pack ice of the Arctic. As a result, the objects themselves have taken on new meanings and associations for me.

Retracing part of the route that Barents and his crew made to Nova Zembla, was an extraordinary experience – extraordinary to travel hundreds of miles without seeing any hint of human existence, past or present. And to see the light changing constantly and to hear the ice gently cracking, groaning or tinkling like thousands of tiny crystals striking one another. It is an extreme and humbling place.

I spent much of the voyage photographing and filming our route through the ice. It felt that the ice sea had close visual analogy to the surface of the compacted prints and books. The video that I took of the shifting ice pack reflected in a replica Claude Glass, is reminiscent of the fragmented prints carried so many years before on the same route through the sea.

A small selection of the photographs that I took:

ANY CHARACTER HERE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some stills from the video footage of the ice pack reflected in the oval, black mirror: 

 

 

Works in Progress – On, In, and Through the Pages

A bespoke paper of pure hemp has now been made in the Berlin workshop of Gangolf Ulbricht for the new series of artist’s books that I am working on. After discussions with Gangolf in both Amsterdam and Berlin, the paper was created in response to that of the Nova Zembla prints.

The next stage was for me to start to consider ways in which this paper might be used as a material in order to explore the initial “ground” for the pages of the books. A 15th century handwritten navigational guide was found amongst the frozen objects on Nova Zembla – a guide that was to be of no use to navigate a passage through the ice and so was left behind in the Saved House; yet another example of things transient both in material and conceptual terms.

After photographing the pages of this journal and laboriously “cleaning” each letter of each word, I am gradually transcribing this text in different forms – gilded, embossed, pinpricked and as watermarks. Each process is visually elusive. Some of them I have realised alone – others have been a collaborative process. I have worked again in Berlin with Gangolf Ulbricht and with Alfons Bytautas in the UK. The resulting forms operate on, in, and through the pages of the new books. Images of some of the objects found encased on the site of the Saved House, are also being explored through these different means. Here are a few images of the works in progress:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Setting the Scene – Temporary Bindings

The light boxes holding “Gaze” and seen in the previous posting, act like a stage – once the light is turned off, the works exist but in a form that makes no real sense. Their feeling of impermanence lies in the very tension created by this knowledge.

Travelling to the Royal Library in the Hague with Idelette van Leeuwen, the Rijks’ Head of Paper Conservation Studio, we examined books of the 16^th and 17^th centuries with bindings similar to temporary ones of the same period – that is to say, simple limp or semi-limp vellum bindings that would be removed at a later date once the final binding had been decided upon.

This experience has allowed me to consider another context within which the ephemeral in drawing might be explored. A different kind of “stage” could be set in the form of a series of unique artists’ books – books are bound in ways that echo the temporary bindings of the past. A series of books which convey the underlying and core themes of transience through their very materiality – and which in turn can be used like journals, diaries or notebooks.

Since that visit, I have started to work in the UK, Amsterdam and Berlin to develop these ideas. I am fortunate to be able to work with Albert Ames, Head of Book Restoration at the Rijks, who is playing a key role in binding the group of 25 books before his retirement next year.

Dust on the Mirror

“Dust has implications about time, about something that can both cover and be removed from a surface. It can transform our understanding an object or a space – and how it is located in time.”

Sîan Bowen – extract from interview with Tony Godfrey, August 2010

Dust on the Mirror is the title of a current international group exhibition in which I am taking part at Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham and which has been curated by Tony Godfrey and Neil Walker. Taking its title from the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna uses the metaphor of dust on the mirror to explain levels of spiritual consciousness, this exhibition brings together five artists from the eastern and western hemispheres.

Given the central role that the ephemeral is plays in my current project at the Rijksmuseum, the opportunity to participate in the exhibition and gain insight into how themes of transience have been explored by the other exhibiting artists, Donna Ong, Chris Cook, Susan Derges and Charwei Tsai, was very revealing.  Further information on the exhibition can be found at: www.lakesidearts.org.uk/exhibitions.html  

Sian Bowen, from “Gaze” series, 2007,  palladium, silver and pigment on laser cut and pin pricked paper mounted in lightboxes.

Papermaking in Berlin

I was very keen to find a papermaker that could understand the particular qualities of the stacks of frozen prints found on Nova Zembla. My first meeting with Berlin-based Gangolf Ulbricht was in Amsterdam where we spent two days at the Rijksmuseum examining the prints from the stores. Gangolf not only makes extraordinarily beautiful paper resulting in part from his deep understanding of historical papers and papermaking but over the years has worked on projects with a wide number of contemporary practitioners – a perfect combination! ( for example Washi Made in Berlin is currently being staged in Tokyo.)

Subsequently I have travelled to Berlin to work with him in his workshop with two objectives in mind. The first was to create a body of paper for the new drawings that has some of the qualities of the paper found in the ice. A laid historical mould was chosen for the purpose and Gangolf has worked to produce a body of bespoke paper of pure unbleached hemp. Held up to the light it has a distinct quality, in part due to the “shadows” which indicate the ribs of the mould. It reflects the light from its surface very softly – reminiscent of the papers used for the prints and the unbleached rags that would have been used to make them.

The second objective has been more complex to achieve. As the relationship between drawing, materiality and the ephemeral is at the centre of the project, I have been keen to explore the potential of translating my drawing into watermarks. Again, bespoke papers of pure hemp have been produced for this purpose. We have also been working to develop watermarks based on the handwritten script of a navigational guide discovered inside the lid of a trunk on the frozen site of the Saved House.