This exhibition of work by Dorota Borowa, Julie Forgues, Julian Forrest and Adam Fung borrows its title Blue Of Distance from Rebecca Solnit's book A field guide to getting lost.
Borowa, Forgues, Forrest, and Fung met in the small mining town of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in the summer of 2023 days before boarding the tall sailing ship Antigua that would take them into the oceans surrounding one of the world’s northernmost inhabited archipelagos.
Alongside two dozen other international artists, they were taking part in that year’s summer solstice Arctic Circle residency. While onboard and on their many forays to shore, they worked with video, photography, drawing, and painting to gather, decipher, document, and reflect on the transformations that are occurring more rapidly there than anywhere else on earth. Since returning to their respective homes, Borowa, Forgues, Forrest, and Fung have been finding ways to connect and further the relationship that began in the Arctic. Though coming from different parts of the globe (Kerry (Ireland, by way of Poland), Texas (USA), Alberta and New Brunswick (Canada)), they share a common interest in creating work that addresses issues of fragility, decay, beauty, and change.
TEXT BY DR Yvonne Scott
September 2024
The title Blue of Distance, draws on a recurrent phrase in a book by Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She explores its multiple meanings, explaining for example how distant landscapes have been represented by artists since the fifteenth century, with depth of field indicated by the blue blurring of the horizon. This feature emulates the way we observe the vastness of a panorama through the medium of air, whose transparency suggests a kind of invisible nothingness. But we know that in reality it is a tangible material zone, through which we peer towards the distant horizon, a region that is consequently perceived - both in the eye and in art - as a blueish haze.
Later in the text, Solnit explores the work of Yves Klein, a French modernist painter from Nice who specialised in seemingly abstract images comprising a particular dense tone of ultramarine blue which suggested the 'void' of the depths of the sky. Klein's celebrated performance art photograph, Leap into the Void (1960), is described by Solnit as his "Leaping towards the Sky" (Solnit, 2017,p.175) a description that imaginatively suggests an endless falling into the blue depths above, however unlikely in reality. Endless or otherwise, distance we know infers time - whatever the definition of the temporal gap between 'then' and 'now', the time it takes to traverse the space between 'here' and 'there' - in the words of a critic, "Klein's twin poles of infinite distance and immediate presence". This sense of distance and presence at the same time - that might seem initially like mutual opposites - suggests something of the complex visual explorations of the Arctic experience by the four artists in the show.
The residency aboard the Antigua was designed to accommodate the exchange of ideas between participant artists and scientists as it journeyed from Longyearben in Norway through icy oceans of the Svalbard archipelago well within the Arctic Circle. The Arctic is a geographical rather than political region; that is, it is not subject to a single defined State boundary. the Arctic Circle is delineated by several definitions that are similar if not identical; on one hand, a fixed location on the globe ( at c 66° N), and on the other to charicterisations of extreme cold and consequent challenges to organic growth. Climate change is however wreaking a devastating impact on the Arctic area which, when defined by its climatic conditions, is subject to increasing shrinkage as the polar ice cap recedes.
The conditions that have rendered the area as an extreme wilderness, that is an environment fundamentally inhospitable for human habitation, is at once desolate and beautiful. Described by the artist Christiane Ritter almost a century ago in her extraordinary and strangley absorbing memoir, A Woman inthe Polar Night, it was alluded to in a recent discussion with the artist Dorota Borowa who was drawn to its sincereity and authenticity as well as its uncompromising description of survival in the region. It conveys with unflinching detail the artist-writer's year living with her husband and his friend in a tiny hut in Svalbard/ Spitzbergen in the 1930s. Ritter, who left the comforts of Austria for the duration, commented on how the experience shed light on what was ultimately important in life. While this compelling text strips away the superfluous niceties of comfortable living to the bare essentials of survival in a minimalist landscape, it also describes a kind of cleansing that reveals a luminous clarity of vision. The artists in the Blue of Distance show have commented also on the effect of the landscape they encountered: the stark purity of the snow with all of its tones that blanketed and concealed, creating a kind of blank canvas for the imagination; the clarity of the air that intensified the experience of the senses from the touch of a breeze to the spirituality of profound silence. Forgues comments how in such 'silence' we can 'hear' nature; wind, rocks, birds, whales, water.
There were notable contradictions too, such as how a pristine environment could also reveal, as Julian Forrest's work demonstrates, the residues of previous activities evident in abandoned fragments: industrial, invasive, scarring. He observes also how time takes on a new dimension in that environment, and while its passing was evident, it somehow also seemed to stand still. The artists in the show have variously commented through their work, on the Arctic environment as elemental, dynamic, transitory, unstable and visceral. Forgues at the same time explores the idea of 'Nordicity' through her photographic images questioning the meanings of space, place and the 'in-between'.
The Arctic has attracted curiousity for centuries, but where travellers were once occasional and infrequent, a growing interest among artists and others is evident today assisted by oppurtunities that facilitate access to the most remote and unstable environments. Understandably there is a desire to see an exceptional wilderness landscape before it disappears forever. Disquiet at the consequence of climate change emerges in the art works. Julie forgues and Adam Fung have each been to the Arctic before, and have witnessed unnerving transformations over time. Forgues reproduces photographs taken on previous visits to the region in the past, but with increasingly leached exposures, like faded ghosts of dissolving memories; exploring the connections between the real, the perceived and the imagined, drawing ideas from French-Canadian geographer, Louis-Edmond Hamelin. Fung's haunting immersive digital exhibit Fathom, was central to an exhibition at the Arlington Museum of Art earlier in 2024, whose title the One Point Five Degrees draws its name from a report on threats from climate chamge caused by a rise in global temperature of 1.5° above pre-industrial levels.
Some of Fung's digital images, along with parts of Fathom, and also some of his seascape paintings, include a flickering candle which in turn has a long history as a symbol in art among the early Flemish painters exploring the represetation of landscape, commonly as a background to popular religious themes, such as the Annunciation to the Virgin ( that she would give birth to Christ). This was typically portrayed by northern European artists of the time in a contemporaneous domestic interior and included a household candle whose flame was shown snuffed out at the moment of miraculous conception. A couple of centuries later, memento mori images, most commonly by Dutch artists featured a candle also, but this time as a symbol of the transitory nature of life. In the past candles had dual function, both as a vital source of light and as a means to measure time. Consequently a candle is an apt symbol in artworks in the show to reference the ecological challenges of climate chamge, while 'to burn the candle at both ends' is sugggestive of the kind of excesses that led to cultural shifts inferred in Forrest's imagery. To summarise the candle symbolises therefore both the protracted processes of transition over time, as well as it's momentous tipping points - religious, existential, social or ecological.
Borowa explores the condition of water in its range, from liquid to solid (ice) forms, as she encountered it during her Arctic foray. Water provided a means of travel in a dramatic and inhospitable terrain, as a supporting and fluctuating body for the ship, or as a meandering stream finding a route of least resistance as it succumbed to the undulating motion of the vessel. In its solid form as ice, its potential ranges significantly. at a local and intimate level, it bonds slices of stone which separate like a puzzle if the ice melts. In its larger scale as an iceberg, it can support a community of seals or pulverise a ship. At a global level, of course, the dissolution of a polar ice cap threatens to overwhelm on an unimaginable scale. Borowa's drawings range from the controlled accidents where glacial melt, rocked by the Arctic waters, leaves blue traces of delicate ripples and eddies on otherwise pristine paper. In exploring the potential of water, from the trickle to the tsunami, Borrowa's explosive wall drawing infers something of its surging power.
Blue can suggest presence as well as distance; near or far, glacier ice appears blue due to the effect of the transmission and scattering of white light. Hoever, the expansive Arctic landscape is inferrred also by the four perceptive artists in the show as an incomparable and fragile terra incognita, a wilderness of vast and hazy horizons to be envisaged before they fade from view.
Dr Yvonne Scott is a fellow emeritus at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art, specializing in the representation of landscape, nature and environment, and she has published extensively in the field. She is an author of the Landscape and Environment in Contemporary Irish Art book which identifies a representative selection of compelling and intriguing artwork by a range of around one hundred of the most challenging and vibrant artists from, or working in, Ireland or whose work addresses Irish landscapes and environments.
