Attentiveness

“The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape and then reassembles the pieces...”

— Barry Lopez

The Library of Ice Nancy Campbell

Out of Ice Elizabeth Ogilvie

The Human Planet Mark Maslin + Simon Lewis

Arctic Dreams + Horizon Barry Lopez

A2B: An Artist’s Journey Robert Callender

The Frayed Atlantic Edge David Gange

We’re loosely theming each of our recommended reading articles. Our previous was Curiosity. Here, we’ve put together a series of books by authors who attend to the minutiae of our environment.

Who better to open with than Nancy Campbell, her Library of Ice is a treasure-trove of icy (hi)stories. Without giving too much away, an excerpt from chapter two stands out for its relevance to global warming today:

On researching the work of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Campbell finds herself reading about snow: “which falls from the Heavens and looks like the stars”. And the perfect composition of snowflakes: “I have been busy examining the little flakes … all were six cornered, with feathered spokes.” Kepler wishes to take a snowflake to his patron, but it quickly melts as a result of his body heat. “Ironically it is his own existence – the warmth of his body – that destroys it”, Campbell observes.

Campbell meets with a climate scientist who’s had a similar experience, holding a melting piece of the Vostok ice-core in the palm of his hand as it “fizzed and melted”. A “Keplerian encounter” Campbell called it, with a 20,000-year-old piece of ice. A microscopic study in global warming and melting ice.

Campbell explores all kinds of ice – from environmental, political and social perspectives, her discussions often brilliantly anchored by artists or artworks. Whether that’s Bill Jacklin’s mural of an ice rink in Reagan National Airport; Antarctic voyager Emma Stibbon’s fluid glacier paintings made from ship windows; or the vibrant canvases of celebrated Greenland painter Emanuel A. Petersen.

Of Stibbon, Campbell writes: “her Antarctic works record all three states of water – solid and liquid and gas – and the permeable line between them, a reminder that it is the only substance to exist naturally in all these forms on Earth.”

And of Grønlandsmaler* (Greenland painter) Petersen – who the author discovered while on a residency at Ilulissat Kunstmuseum – she observes subtle evidence of the artist’s self-taught hand in his canvases of icebergs and glaciers. Not in the brushwork itself, but in the artist’s surface preparations (or lack thereof), handling and storage. Pin holes pierce the canvases; dents, gashes and cracks subtly alter the images. Patches show where paint once depicted ice. Campbell muses over the unintentional poetry in these scars:

“These incremental physical changes in the paintwork seem even more than Petersen’s original marks to express the character of ice.”

Towards the end of the book Campbell features artist Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the sound of). Paterson’s artwork made the Vatnajökull glacier “accessible to anyone who dialled a specific telephone number. This reached a mobile, that was connected to the glacier via a microphone … the fact that Vatnajökull had its own phone number somehow personified it…”

We’ll feature Paterson’s Monograph in a future article.

*Greenland painters played an important role in creating an image of Greenland for the European public before photography became established.

Ice is the key subject for artist Elizabeth Ogilvie, who questions through powerful display, whilst still inviting us in personally. Ogilvie looks north, too. Most recently, through her impressive exhibition and publication Out of Ice. Her working life is characterised by a deep connection with water – or, perhaps it’s more fitting to say simply her life, for she’s had a preoccupation with water since childhood. In recent years, her focus has been on ice.

Art historian Andrew Patrizio says of Ogilvie that she encourages people to see, not just to look, “to pay attention in a mindful way with the possibility that they then might act.” And, in the same way as Robert Macfarlane describes the work of author Barry Lopez as “begin[ing] in the aesthetic”, yet “tend[ing] to the ethical”, the same is true of Ogilvie, who engages deeply with the topic of climate crisis, working on wide ranging collaborations, creating stunning water and film installations – part documentary, part poetry. The book she has co-produced includes insight into Inuit life, on building an igdlo, on prepping a sled; relations between ice and soil in the Anthropocene (that soil is “sealed … beneath layers of concrete and asphalt … banished to subterranean realms”); and crescendos in a series of pages exploring her exhibition of the same name in Ambika P3 gallery.

“As the world looks north for indicators of its future, art gives the landscape visual and exportable form, allowing it to serve as beacon, message and reflection” – says Julie Decker in her contribution to Out of Ice. On discussing Ogilvie’s installation at Ambika P3 gallery, in which “the ice melted faster than expected” due to the body heat of guests, gallery director Katharine Heron states “…unlike the melting of the great ice caps in the polar areas, which too continues so much faster than anticipated, these blocks could indeed be replaced.”

The beginnings of the Anthropocene will feed into the future stories we tell about ourselves and of human development.

“Human impacts are at the level of dictating the future of the only place in the universe where life is known to exist. This is a historic declaration...”

The Human Planet by Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis helps us to define the Anthropocene, and how it came about. That we are responsible for the rapid decline in our planet’s health is in no doubt…

“If you compressed the whole of Earth’s unimaginably long history into a single day, the first humans that looked like us would appear at less than four seconds to midnight. From our origins in Africa, we spread and settled on all the continents except Antarctica. Earth now supports 7.5 billion people, living on average longer and physically healthier lives than at any time in our history. In this brief time, we have created a globally integrated network of cultures of immense power. On this journey, we have also exterminated wildlife, cleared forests, planted crops, domesticated animals, released pollution, created new species and even delayed the next ice-age. Although geologically recent, our presence has had a profound impact on our home planet. We humans are not just influencing the present, for the first time in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, a single species is increasingly dictating its future. In the past, meteorites, super volcanoes, and the slow tectonic movements of the continents radically altered the climate of Earth, and the life-forms that populated it. Now, there is a new force of nature changing earth – homo sapiens – the so called “wise people.”

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, we have released 2.2 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – increasing levels by 44%. This is acidifying the world’s oceans and raising Earth’s temperature. Human actions are altering the global carbon cycle at a faster rate than when Earth transitioned from glacial, to inter-glacial conditions.

What we are doing to the Earth is unusual in the context of all of Earth’s history. As an example, “we humans have altered the global nitrogen cycles so fundamentally that the nearest realistic geological comparison is an event almost 2.5 billion years ago.”

We have known since the 1800s that our actions have clear and damaging environmental impacts, but corporations have continued to snub warning signs. The chapter Fossil Fuels: the Second Energy Revolution is perhaps the book’s most important, succinctly summarising how we humans have ended up where we are today.

We would recommend Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocence as an ideal illustrative companion to The Human Planet.

Our friend Joanna Wright (an artist based in Ullapool, Scotland) says of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams – “Lopez’s long experience of the north brought a shift of perspective to how my western mind thinks about the natural world. I loved its insistence on noticing detail, and honesty about the contradictions we are tangled in and need to see a way through.”

We would also add that Lopez’s latest auto-biographical work – Horizon – is an ideal follow up to Arctic Dreams, in which a life’s travels are re-visited and his Arctic commentary re-worked to tie to current day data.

Artist Robert Callender, is quoted as having said of his installation Plastic Beach – in the publication A2B: An Artist’s Journey – that it’s “for our children’s children’s children.” That it was designed “to draw attention in a graphic way to the grave state of our coastline.”

Callender expressed the desire to produce this edition during the short illness leading to his death in 2011. The edition documents his key works, projects, research and studio. Encased within a beautifully designed box, A2B includes a series of bound volumes, prints and a DVD, telling of his compelling vision. Callender’s work is highly attuned, matched in quality and depth by that of his wife Elizabeth Ogilvie.

Ogilvie – who oversaw production of the edition – has shown consideration at the highest level, balancing sophisticated layout in accordance with the never over-indulgent work of her late husband.

Warming oceans mean that Seahorses are struggling to find cool enough temperatures to survive. By 2050 these fascinating creatures could be completely extinct. That same warming process, resulting in rapid ice loss at our poles, means that Harp seals face a race against time to birth and rear their pups upon unstable ice sheets. That same melt renders the great Gnarwhal vulnerable – without ice-cover they’ll have nowhere to feed and nowhere hide from killer whales. The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell (beautifully illustrated by Talya Baldwin) champions our planet’s most valuable and vulnerable creatures – many we’ll lose as a result of our own actions. “Time is running short”, the author writes, asking us to “look, only look, at what is here, and would you agree to astonishment, and to love? For love, allied to attention, will be urgently needed in the years to come.”

“I am glad not to be a Greenland Shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill 500 years. But I find the very idea of them hopeful. They will see us pass through whichever spinning chaos we may currently be living through, and the crash that will come after it…”

We’ll close this post on the shore, with David Gange’s The Frayed Atlantic Edge.

“If timelessness exists anywhere on Earth”, Gange writes, “it is not in sight of the sea.” His book is a mesmerising journey:

“I set off to spend a year kayaking the Atlantic coastlines from Shetland to Cornwall. The idea was to travel slowly and close to the water, in touch with both the natural world and the histories of the coastal communities. I spent as much time in coastal archives as in the boat, gathering stories and learning what Britain and Ireland look like with oceanic geographies at the centre.”

To our delight, Gange features artists too – from Jane Anne Gilchrist, to the late Derek Hill.