‘Where we are is here’…
(after Orkney poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait)
In 2022 I began work with glaciologist Oddur Sigurðsson at the Icelandic Meteorological Office researching his amazing personal archive of stereoscopic 3d slides that he took documenting all Icelandic glacier movement from the 1960s to 2000s taken by him from a plane at 10,000ft. The collection includes paper documentation from many families over generations that have observed, through drawing and written text, glacier movement on their land.
I have been collaborating with Oddur since 2015 throughout my creative practice on the ‘Papay Probe’ project, where Orkney islanders sent a glacier testing probe to the Myrdalsjökull glacier: https://www.saoirsehiggins.org/art-projects/papayprobe and with the Icelandic Glaciological Society scientists and volunteers taking part in annual field expeditions taking core samples of the glacier, filming and sensing the experiences.
According to Oddur, Iceland acts as a smaller scale indicator of future changes in the Arctic and Greenland ice shelf. As an artist I am interested in this inter-scalar position, the ‘overview’ image looking down at earth from distant satellites, the ‘ground truthing’ view up close and physically connecting with in the landscape, with different forms of expert narratives ‘echo locating’ with each other. I am interested especially in people/community who build knowledge and ‘data’ over time sensing their environment around them, such as Oddur - the unsung activists that do not describe themselves as such.
In our present world-view, we get a steady stream of doom narratives from mainstream media that need pushing back with new creative counter narratives that give us urgent power and momentum to activate change.
Through this project publication and exhibition I wish to ‘ignite’ the inter scalar narratives from Oddur’s archive, lifting them out and placing them into public hands. How can we as ordinary folk develop a relationship and sense a key climate indicator such as a glacier though we may never visit or experience it? Ultimately, I wish to create a travelling body of work, taking it to places and communities that do not encounter glaciers first hand but are effected and connected to glaciers via their surrounding seas e.g Ireland.
