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Svalbard: Arctic inspiration
WGSN, October 17 2005

Inspired by a trip to Svalbard in the northern most part of Norway, British sculptor Rachel Whiteread is not alone in finding inspiration in the Arctic.

Is it a whitewashed warehouse of anonymous boxes or a chilled polar landscape? Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread has unveiled her latest creation in the vast Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern. Entitled Embankment, it consists of 14,000 white polyethylene casts of cardboard boxes, stacked in haphazard or strictly ordered mountains.

Wandering through the "gulleys" created by the tall towers of boxes evokes an unsettling feeling of vastness, something which Whiteread hoped to convey after her recent trip to Svalbard in Norway, telling ArtReview that the work is "something to do with the gargantuan size and whiteness of the place. It was sublime."

Whiteread travelled to Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago along with a number of other artists as part of the Cape Farewell science/art expedition in March 2005.

Alex Hartley is another artist who voyaged on the Cape Farewell expeditions and his recent London exhibition Don't want to be part of your world is a series of large-format landscape photographs of idyllic, desolate vistas, in which are inserted architectural models, such as a Bond villain style glass-walled retreat sitting unassailably on a high Arctic ridge. Hartley's focus is not on the representation of space, but how we imagine ourselves within it.

Norwegian artist Christian Houge has been photographing the island of Spitsbergen - known as one of the cleanest places on earth - for the last five years. Arctic Technology is a series of large-format panoramic photographs often shot in pure moonlight and featuring the enormous technological structures that enable scientists to study climate change, atmospheric pollution and outer space.

"The installations reveal the strong contrast between the primal landscape and technology, man and man's creations," says Houge.

With various Cape Farewell exhibitions planned in London over the next six months, the Arctic won't seem so far away.

Key Trends

Arctic inspiration: think climate issues, notions of space and vastness, purity and technology integrated with nature.

Links

Svalbard - Norwegian for "cold edge" - is situated halfway between Norway and the North Pole.
www.visitnorway.com.

Cape Farewell is a series of expeditions into the Arctic, through a route previously icebound but now passable, drawing together scientists, teachers, and renowned artists.
www.capefarewell.com.

Svalbard features in the complex, philosophical children's trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. The first book, The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights), is set for film adaptation in 2007

For more ice capers, there's the Absolute Ice Bar (www.belowzerolondon.com), which opened in September 2005 in London, where guests can enjoy sub-zero vodka in a very chilly atmosphere.

Exhibitions

The Unilever Series: Rachel Whiteread, Embankment www.tate.org.uk

Christian Houge: Arctic Technology
www.scoutgallery.com

Alex Hartley: Don't want to be part of your world
www.victoria-miro.com

The Ice Garden (The Ship - The Art of Climate Change)
www.oomf.org.uk

The Ship - The Art of Climate Change
www.nhm.ac.uk

© WGSN 2005