Artist Ilana Halperin in conversation with Fruitmarket Director, Fiona Bradley to celebrate her exhibition What Is Us and What Is Earth, and the publication of the book that accompanies it.
What Is Us and What Is Earth is an exhibition of sculpture, drawing and photography from Glasgow based artist Ilana Halperin, whose art seeks to make geological time human; to map the incomprehensible vastness of geological time and the natural world through the knowable familiarity of human experience.
The earliest work in this exhibition, Boiling Milk Solfataras (1999), shows the artist heating milk in a small saucepan in a hot sulphur spring in Iceland. Halperin has described the work as like ‘waiting for all the layers of geological time and activity to make their way up to the surface to the point where it’s humanly viable to connect with it. With as little mediation as possible’. Four years after making it, as she turned 30, Halperin realised that she was born the same year as the Eldfell volcano off the coast of Iceland. Mapping the timeline of her life onto that of the volcano, she has celebrated her 30th, 40th, 50th and 51st birthdays alongside it, developing a considerable body of work. This exhibition brings much of that work together, including watercolours, drawings, text and small sculptures made with material gifted to Halperin by the volcano: crystals, a pair of agates and a lava bomb.
Sharing your birthday with a volcano is a way to speed up deep time, and several of Halperin’s sculptural series do that too. Boiling milk on the surface of geothermally rich waters led her to investigate ‘fast geology’ further, and to a collaboration to ‘grow’ sculptures with the calcifying springs of Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint-Nectaire in France. The exhibition includes the earliest cave casts Halperin made with the springs, and a new rock cycle, with Scottish fossils and marble, and Herkimer quartz crystals from New York telling an age-old, brand new ‘diamond story’.
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