Ilana Halperin on her new exhibition: ‘The project has allowed me to reach out to other artists and academics’
Sharing her birthday with an Icelandic volcano, artist Ilana Halperin knew that one day she would create work about Eldfell. That day has arrived as she tells Claire Sawers about the close links between humans and geology
There’s a lava bomb in Ilana Halperin’s new exhibition. But it’s no ordinary lava bomb: this one flew out of Eldfell volcano, mid-eruption, in 1973. It was gifted to Halperin by anthropologist Gísli Pálsson, whose childhood home was devoured by lava in that same eruption on the Icelandic island of Heimaey. While writing his memoir about Eldfell, Pálsson came across Halperin’s work which explores the intimate connections between humans and geology, pondering life’s bigger questions through the study of rocks, fossils, crystals and agates.
Pálsson and Halperin became colleagues and he posted the lava bomb to Halperin on her 45th birthday. ‘It’s amazing,’ says Halperin enthusiastically over Zoom, holding the dark grey rock up to her webcam. ‘It has this fluorescent orange tape around it saying in Icelandic: “Collected while still glowing”. I call it “Self Portrait As A Lava Bomb”. A lava bomb flies through the air, hardening as it cools, sometimes taking on the shape of the journey before it lands. It’s a very beautiful, evocative object; it records its journey from the inside of the earth, meeting air then eventually meeting land.’
The Glasgow-based artist started visiting Eldfell during a challenging time, just before she turned 30. Her father was ill with cancer and she was travelling regularly between Scotland and Maine to visit her parents; those flights to Boston stopped over in Iceland. Halperin was born the same year as the Eldfell volcano formed and she decided to celebrate her 30th birthday on its slopes. She has since returned for their joint 40th, 50th and 51st anniversaries.
.jpg)
‘Eldfell is the heart and core of the Fruitmarket exhibition. My relationship with the volcano serves as the entry point into all my work.’ The earliest work in this astonishing show is ‘Boiling Milk (Solfataras)’ from 1999, a photo of the artist heating milk in a saucepan in a hot sulphur spring in Iceland.
There is also a map drawing of Halperin’s (on loan from Glasgow’s Hunterian Collection) alongside sculptures from the calcifying springs of Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint-Nectaire in France, quartz crystals from New York and photos taken on field trips to Hawaii, Japan, Orkney and Mount Etna.
Her mind-blowing work contains enormous depths, touching on philosophical and spiritual themes as she examines the intersections between deep time and human time. ‘I’m interested in non-abstract ways to look at processes that seem incomprehensible; to open up places of reflection. Thinking of our human connections to lifeforms that are millions of years old. Eldfell will live a lot longer than me and at some point it will go from a shared, human life span to a geological life span and will keep going. Instead of focusing on ageing, loss and death, the Eldfell project has allowed me to reach out to other artists and academics. Instead of closing down, it has allowed this real opening up.’
Ilana Halperin: What Is Us And What Is Earth, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until Sunday 17 May; part of the Royal Scottish Academy bicentenary.