Magnetic North

One of three key note speakers at the  Sensuous Knowledge conference.

In 2004 I clambered onto a 100-year old Dutch schooner and sailed North, as far North as you can before reaching the Arctic ice-cap. I sailed into the ice and in some ways I never came back.

The voyage was part of Cape Farewell’s programme of taking artists and scientists to climate change ‘front-line’ areas. Thus we cannot only see, feel and record what is happening, but there is also the inevitable cross-pollination of science and art. This is valuable as both parties learn something beyond the exchange of data: about approach, presentation and perspective.

For me there was the envy of the science: the empirical way they worked. Everything was calibrated, measured, charted, timed, collected, preserved, counted and logged. Whereas I stood on deck and thought: this is too beautiful, too terrible (in the sense of instilling terror), too ‘other’ to be able to represent. So I decided to make pseudo-scientific graphs and charts to measure how the Arctic felt: the one thing that the scientists could not measure. These works, The Arctic Feel-O-Graphs were a series of lenticulars that have since been shown at the London Natural History Museum and in similar venues internationally.

During the summer of 2009 I travelled to five Norwegian glaciers (Briksdals-, Kjenndal-, Suphelle-, Bøya- and Bondhusbreen) to archive their retreat. I have been collecting Norwegian postcards of these glaciers, circa 1890-1930. The postcards represent an accurate, and more interestingly, unintentional record of the position and condition of glaciers a century ago, mostly captured in a desire to replicate and communicate the romanticism of the area, for tourists, travellers and those abroad who could not reach these places. They seem to hint at nostalgia for a lost ice world before we even knew we were losing it. The anonymous photographers cannot have known they were creating brilliant semi-scientific data that would be of immense interest to geographers, scientists, climatologists and artists of the future.

Given the speed that the ice caps are melting, both Antarctica and Arctic, with also Greenland, Iceland and South America losing their glaciers, there is urgency. Can we stand by, amused at the dynamics of a wilful earth, posing in front of glaciers in our modern day fineries?

Michèle Noach, Artist

Read more about the other Key Note Speakers