letters from the north

Providence: Part 4 in the Shackleton Series

2012-01-16T03:07:00.002Z

Providence opened on Friday at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids. Their new building is beautiful, all green/LEED certified. The nautical flags spelled out 6 phrases from Sir Ernest Shackleton's autobiography South: 'the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech', 'we met an old man who started as if he had seen the devil', ' we had pierced the veneer of outside things', 'our minds were set upon reaching the haunts of man', 'that was all of tangible things but in memories we were rich', 'pain and ache, boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigues seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things'.

And the 4 piano compositions were inspired by those phrases: A call to exigency, a call to reckoning, a call for mourning and a call for Providence. I will post the sound pieces on my website soon.

UICA show- PROVIDENCE- two weeks left!

2011-12-30T14:55:00.000Z

The Modern Quilt Guild of Ann Arbor has been assisting me to sew 350 nautical flags for the UICA. It has been really amazing to see how fast these women sew, sew, sew! In the history of polar exploration (1800's & early 1900's) it was tradition for the various ladies guilds and women's christian organizations in the UK to make sledge flags and other sewn items for crewmembers to take with them. They created dolls to give the Inuit in the high north and handkerchiefs.

This show follows in the same vein. We have sewn 7 phrases from Shackleton's autobiography South, in particular the chapter where he and 2 others cross South Georgia Island. Phrases such as 'our minds were set on reaching the haunts of man' and 'pain and ache, boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigue seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things' and 'That was all of tangible things but in memories we were rich'. Shackleton and his men trekked for 36 hours straight, reaching the whaling station on the other side of the island. No one had ever breached the inner reaches of this mountainous island. Along with the flags, there will be 4 sound pieces evoking the various stages of this trek: hunger, resonance, fatigue and providence.

Kansas City Show Review

2011-12-15T15:08:00.000Z

The Kansas City Star did a nice review of the Re:Search show, which is up now through January at the Paragraph/Project galleries via the Charlotte Street Foundation. If you happen to be around Kansas City, check out the show! I'm super pleased to be showing with two great artists, Erika Hanson and Hillary Wiedemann.

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/12/07/3304674/the-art-of-exploration-at-paragraph.html

What you see is 600 ft of 3-strand cotton rope that will be used in my new installation at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids MI. Their new gallery is beautiful, totally LEED certified with a fantastic blackbox theatre, film theatre, roof top garden and many gallery spaces in which to show work. I'll be showing in their Vertical Project Space= 50" high.

November show: Charlotte Street Foundation

2011-11-07T02:52:00.002Z

My show in November is at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, MO called Re-Search. Curated by fiber/sculpture artist Erika Lynne Hansen, it features video artist Hillary Wiedemann, Erika Lynne Hansen and myself. I will be showing some older work, the It Is Never Tomorrow photographic series. The show revolves around artists who use historical research to motivate their artistic endeavors. The show will be up through December. The artist talks are on Saturday at noon.

http://www.charlottestreet.org/2011/10/re-search-three-projects-opening-on-1118-at-6pm-paragraph-project-space/

http://www.hillarywiedemann.com
http://www.elhanson.com/

Also, I will be showing at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids in January- mid March. Stay tuned for some images. Flags, lots of flags. And hopefully some ham radio.

The show is up! 'April 24' at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

2011-06-14T03:03:00.000Z

After our last night on solid ground:

It is the movement of a goodbye,
(the severing of a mooring line, two ships together tied)
and the swell causes difficulty.
It is the great heave of the sea.

An island full of pausing,
(a white handkerchief, too much by five hundred weight)
as an oar, held out,
separates men from boats.

The final gift is brief words,
(in the event of our failures, towards northeast gaze)
anchored as mindful patterns,
while the tide returns again.

Soon clear of the breakers,
(sails set against grim heights, a line of figures dark)
all is blanketed by delay.
Look out, and linger.

So look out, and wait.

To hear the sound component:
http://www.theaeck.com/projectsframe.html

Mary Thomas from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a preview of the biennial in last Wednesday newspaper:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11159/1152012-437.stm

Pittsburgh Biennial: June - October 2011

2011-05-09T20:53:00.001Z

The Pittsburgh Biennial's website is now up and links all the artists + locations participating this year. I will be showing at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, curated by Adam Welch. The opening is June 10, and the other locations open at various points throughout the summer & fall. The PGH Center's show is up until October.

I will be creating a new installation including a new video + I am back at the piano creating a new sound piece for it.

http://biennial.pittsburgharts.org/

Right now my website is in maintenance. It will be back up by this weekend.

Cutting the painter

2011-04-18T23:11:00.000Z

In Gretel Ehrlich’s book, A Match to the Heart, in which the author recounts and reflects upon being struck by lightning (for the second time), she brings up the Bardo Thodal, or Tibetan Book of the Dead. ‘I wander in the bardo state alone’ (Ehrlich, page 41). ‘Bar’ means between and ‘do’ means a landmark that stands between two things. As she explains it, when placed together, this word becomes ‘gap’, or, ‘the wandering state between life and death’, ‘confusion and enlightenment’, ‘the past just occurred and the future has not yet happened’, ‘a gray ocean with no reference points, no lighthouse’, and ‘uncertainty and groundlessness’.

Sir Ernest Shackleton and his 5 men cut the painter between the James Caird and the Stancomb Wills and from the remaining 22 men, waving from the shore of Elephant Island on April 24, 1916. The men stand between the grays of tall cliffs and a vast ocean. They stand in the pregnant pause, with the past 6 hours of exertion sent away with the gusting wind: the launch of the 22 foot James Caird into the water, the caddying of provisions and a ton of ballast into it, while resisting the unruly waves spitting them back into the tiny island.

The 22 men bellow three cheers as Shackleton + the five others dip into the trough of a wave and vanish. No reference points, no rescue boat, no lighthouse. Each man alone in their physical ache for England, for loves so distant, and for dry clothing. Only persistent, steady, horizon line.

The body as landmark. A body with groundlessness and steady tide.

Unbound: to hope till Hope creates

2011-02-25T01:35:00.001Z

Unbound: to hope till Hope creates
EARLVILLE OPERA HOUSE, EARLVILLE NY

New sculpture, sound and photography based on two scenes from Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition
OPENING SATURDAY, FEB. 26: noon-3pm

FEBRUARY 26 THROUGH APRIL 2, 2011
_________________________________________________________________________________

“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.”
Excerpt from Prometheus Unbound, by Percy Byssche Shelly

The sound piece is arranged from British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams’ (1872-1958) Sinfonia Antarctica No. 7. The loudest sections, the crescendos and torrential occurrences, and the quietest solos, the rests and repetitions, have been lifted and rearranged to create a new piece filled with either moments of chaos or of orderliness. Moments where there is hesitation, un-surety and fear and moments of calm and reassurance and possible trust. The piece begins with a drum roll, which is Endurance’s entrance into the Antarctic ice pack, the beginning of its end. There are three temperamental segments that reference the crushing of the ship’s timbers and planks, and then its final death scene. The end is quiet and features a violin echoing back onto itself: the 6 men pulling away from Elephant Island in the James Caird in order to save the entire crew. The piece ends neither sadly nor exuding hope: it is more a feeling of distance and an internal voice of a man’s weary thoughts.

Jupiter finds meaning from the title of the exhibition and Percy Byssche Shelley’s play, Prometheus Unbound. It is the story of Prometheus’ captivity and subsequent release from Jupiter’s grips (Greek: Zeus). Jupiter, now overthrown, no longer determines Prometheus’ fate. There is no reconciliation between the god and human. There is no acceptance or forgiveness. Jupiter possesses no compass for compassion or remorse: it is the Antarctic in all its non-humanness.

http://www.earlvilleoperahouse.com

Reading fortunes

2011-02-11T19:35:00.000Z

What does it mean to become unbound?

British Victorian society had a fascination with predicting futures, beckoning ghosts, and other unworldly and heavenly conjuring. There are documented reports and books discussing séances held to draw lost sailors and captains out from their watery tombs. Did these obsessions carry into the next era, as British explorers still became lost at the poles?

Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition (Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition) marked the end of this particular Age of Exploration. From Robert Falcon Scott's final death march to this Antarctic expedition, the era of grand voyages in the terms laid out by the technology of the day and nationalistic pride of white men journeying forth into the 'unknown' came to a known end. The gruesome reality of WW1 shook those British exploratory foundations to the bone.

The second photograph in my upcoming exhibition shows tea leaves left at the bottom of a teacup that is caught up in the undulation of a sea, tumultuous and hungry. When the fortune teller attempts to read the leaves, what message reveals itself? Is it hope or despair? Will this tiny boat be capsized and crushed or be released and infinite in its wandering? Unbound from Edwardian cast systems, unleashed from the ice, and able to set its sails and make it to land.

Stormy Seas: Classical compositions distilled to clashes and clangs

2011-01-13T02:29:00.000Z

One of the sound pieces I am working on for my next show features symphonies inspired by the sea/antarctica/ships sinking. This includes Vaughn Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica and Bridge's The Sea: 4. Storm from the early 1900's. Extracting the clashes, blasting horns along with some quieter sections of bass lines and soprano soloists' fluttering voices, I am hoping that the outcome and mixing will mimic Shackleton's ship being crushed by the ice. Bangs! Crashes! And not necessarily in rhythm at times. The Endurance did not get crushed all at once, but rather over a series of days. It was caught on moving film using a kinematograph-camera by the expedition's documenter: F. Hurley, who had gone on previous Antarctic expeditions and was no slouch to danger.

The show will feature a few photographs as well: A cup, a flag, a cliff, a gray. I am trying to utilize some recent Pittsburgh snowy ledges and cliffs that I often see on my commute to work. And the blueness of the winter mornings cast certain shadows and colorations that cannot be captured at other times of the year.

New Year: New Show: And still lots of work in progress

2011-01-05T16:54:00.002Z

Welcome 2011. Lots of articles, news, books to catch up on! Lots of work still in progress!

I woke up this morning to find that my show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts last April has been included into the Pittsburgh Post Gazette's Art & Cultures writer Mary Thomas's 'Best of 2010'. A nice thing to see first thing in the morning!

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11005/1115528-437.stm

On another note, I will be showing new work at the Earlville Opera House in Earlville NY from February 26- April 2. The show will feature Chapter 2 in the 5 part installation series I am creating based on Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition in the Antarctic. The work culls from two scenes: when 8 Emperor penguins mysteriously appeared as the ship, the Endurance, was sinking into the icy depths leaving the men finally truly abandoned. The penguins dirge-like calls were ones that the men had never heard before. The second scene is when Shackleton and his five chosen men set sail on their 800+ mile open-water journey, leaving the remainder of the crew to fend for themselves on Elephant Island. The drastic view from both the stranded and the journeying-forth is humming with energy: That moment when both are staring at the other, recognizing the other.

I see these two scenes as tipping points for hope + loss. Both scenes possess a deep intimacy with the possibility of forthcoming death. They radiate with the notion of a polar environment swallowing whole and leaving no trace. The moment when the human recognizes an intimacy with Emptiness. And I love how the Emperor penguins with their strange instincts play a part in that for the humans.

The Arctic Governance Project

2010-06-23T13:54:00.004Z

This morning I came across a database of articles concerning the Arctic and policy amongst the various countries with Arctic ownership. It is set up by The Arctic Governance Project, which seeks to join the Arctic's local population, policy makers, and researchers in conversation and collaboration. The articles cover oil & gas policy, tourism, fishing and commerce rights, environmental impacts of industry, and governmental inter-relationships amongst the Arctic holding countries.

http://arcticgovernance.custompublish.com/finland-supports-norways-project-to-replace-russias-radioactive-rtg-lighthouses-in-the-gulf-of-finland.4683820-137746.html

Review in Pittsburgh Post Gazette

2010-06-03T19:11:00.003Z

Art Critic Mary Thomas of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette featured my work in her review of the solo shows at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It appeared in yesterday's Art & Entertainment section. What a great surprise! The shows close next Sunday, June 13th. The last artist talks are this Sunday, June 6 @ 1pm.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10153/1062323-437.stm

The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts is located at the corner of Shady Ave. & 5th Ave. in Shady Side- Parking is available- The hours are 10-5pm Tuesday-Saturday, until 7pm on Thursdays, 12-5pm Sunday: phone 412-361-0873

The scripting of scenes

2010-05-25T17:50:00.004Z

I have begun to write a play about Shackleton, Amundson and Scott. Currently it is just notes and ideas and imagery. The exciting stage! But over the next several months I will be reading/reviewing a few books about them- biographs, auto-Bs, historical accounts, etc, to get a framework for their characters, quirks and personality ticks. And also to get ideas for the sequencing. Of course being set in the Antarctic, there will be ice and ships, and definitely a hot air balloon scene as Shackleton was the first to experience an aerial view of Antarctica's wonders. I may throw in an Empirer penguin or two. And not to forget the giant albatross.

The 3 explorers and their stories offer enough inspiration for creating a epic tapestry of landscapes, forms and emotions, and a nonlinear journey of discovery and failure. A question is whether to begin with a death or a triumph? For their stories contain both.

Performance narrative- Sunday May 16 @1pm

2010-05-09T15:29:00.006Z

My gallery talk at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts is Sunday, May 16 at 1pm. This is not going to be a regular gallery talk where I stand in front of my photographs and sculpture and discuss it. Rather, I will be performing writing I have done about the concepts in my work accompanied by an unfurling of images from my past work, current work, and documentation of the research I've completed at various archives. It is organized in 3 Acts: The Launch, Sorrow's Knot, and Soliloquy. After there will be a question/answer session where I may or may not continue to create fictions.

Concepts revolve around an aesthetics of disappearance, the play of history constructed from fictions, landscape as memoryscape, and all pertaining to the British encountering the Arctic in the 1800's: particularly the Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845. I liken the talk to a visual narrative performance where I encourage the listener to come along with me on an arctic expedition.

Below are excerpts of what you may see+hear= image + text

______________________________________________________________________________________

"....Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth unravels a quest for the Unknown. Its story is both fiction and historical record. The John Franklin Expedition story lies in both realms as well. The people who constructed public memory are long since gone. The duration between Franklin's departure down the Thames River and subsequent disappearance was crucial in establishing the myth. Only two incomplete bodies were ever brought back to England for burial. A phantasm of pieces, not wholes. The objects returned to England lack their original functions: The objects failed. The trail of random artifacts found over the many decades fueled the debate over mysterious 'N.O.C's', or Not Otherwise Classified objects, that were useless to the forensics of a linear story. But, they lend themselves well to a Jules Vernian retelling...."

"...The North is a mouth, swallowing whole lambs. Ignoring Mercator, Cartesian, and.... I follow my fingers up the lines to see where I haven't been. Find hoarfrost and mirage, castles that pass in silence. Find ice and beacon pushing, pushing through sounds and bays. I follow my fingers' downward decent. Further on lay the Southern seas, gnashing teeth and the fury piled up in palpable mounds burn my fingers, weathered skin. Turn into history's wind. Face it open-chested like the bow of a ship. Face it lapping tongued like the seal gulping air. Face it whipped and flogged, beaten but still wobbling. My toes find stability and density. Yet they secretly move me farther and farther away. I gather wind and wail, placing them into my ears, till only threads from torn garments realize what's gone...."

Hope to see you there!

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
6300 5th Ave at the corner of 5th Ave. and Shady Ave. in Shady Side. Parking Lot and additional street parking available.

Please email me if you have any questions- Thea_a_eck@yahoo.com

Rendering the North: 1708 Gallery in Richmond VA

2010-04-23T19:23:00.007Z

Tonight opens Rendering the North at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond Virginia. This has been a fantastic week and experience working with the gallery staff and setting up this show.

The show consists of the 15 photographs from the It Is Never Tomorrow series along with a new sculpture piece titled To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield which is from one of Shackleton's favorite poems by Tennyson.

Here begins the artist statement for this show. The beginning section is similar to my Pittsburgh show because they both included the It is Never Tomorrow photograph series.

"Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.
Book of Job, the Bible

Rendering the North overlaps two British stories: the first, a high Arctic tragedy of a famed expedition’s disappearance, and the second, a southern Antarctic tale about the balance of fate. This work scours archived documentary, poetic inventions, and phantasms of personal imagination.

The photographs encompass a wandering soliloquy in search of ghosts who remain caught in a bitter expanse and the struggle for communication: The hunt for the Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845. Sent as the largest and most technically advanced of its time, the expedition sought to finalize the Northwest Passage to the Pacific as well as to obtain calculations around magnetic north pole. The story pauses on the silence of the entire 133-member crew by 1847, and gathers momentum as search and rescue expeditions began filling the Arctic seeking clues. Over 150 years seasonal freezing and thawing hid and uncovered objects and histories. And as a result, the threaded fingers of a map filled up with coastlines, new Inuit populations encountered, and inventions and communication methods appropriated or generated. The western shroud of the Arctic was rent from the globe.

"A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground."
Ernest Shackleton, South

The sculptures find their dwelling in the great Southern Ocean, whose waters churn easterly around a vast landmass and a steadfast crew’s movement across ice and biting water: The multiple chapters of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance voyage of 1914.

The expedition sailed from England the day the War broke and returned at the height of its tragedies. Planning to transcribe their path across Antarctica’s breadth, they never set foot on its land. Instead they lost horse and home but never hope while striving to hold British soil again. The story involves a 800 mile open-water boat journey, latitude and longitude’s loss of land, sledges hauled by men, and all commanded by a man who saw balance in ranks and fate."

Materials/imagery included are a nautical flag tree form that spells out the sculpture's title, a two headed pony with various renditions of mercator map projections streaming from its feet, a suitcase with a working metronome attached, and a sinking wooden structure above a sledge carrying wax candles whose wicks form the leashes of 3 ceramic bells. All are suspended and balanced with each other on antique wooden pulleys using three-stranded cotton roping.

Thank you to 1708 Gallery staff Tatjana and Jolene for making this show easy-peasy, to the 1708 Gallery Board of Directors, as well as to interns Erica and Spencer for assisting me to install the sculpture.

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts: April 16-June13

2010-04-17T18:56:00.008Z

Last night opened my solo show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. The show features the "It Is Never Tomorrow' photograph series along with two new sculpture pieces, The slings and arrow of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of trouble and Ye mourners who in silent gloom. The show runs until June 13. My artist talk is Sunday, May 16 at 1pm. I would like to thank the Shady Oak Foundation, A Few Bad Apples Foundation, The Lovely Ladies Baking Team, and my Grandpa for making this show possible.

This sculpture piece gets its title from Shakespear's Hamlet and his famous soliloquy in Act 3, scene 1. "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-'

The speakers are playing two compositions by Estonian composer Arvo Part- Te Deum and Silouans Song- at the same time.

The nautical flag is one used by British Captain McClintock's sledge team on their hunt for clues about the fate of the John Franklin Expedition of 1845. The biscuits are a version of hard tack.

This sculpture's title, Ye mourners who in silent gloom, comes from the phrase found on a package of funeral biscuits from England in the mid 1800's.

It became custom to hand out biscuit style cookies as a 'take home' gift from funerals during this time period. It is the phrase that is spelled out through the black nautical flags on the tree form.

The suitcase + globe form has both a humidity gage and temperature gage on either end of it.

And a few of the 'It Is Never Tomorrow' photographs already found on my website-

_______________________________________________________________________________________________
The following is my artist statement for this show.

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.
Book of Job, the Bible

Inisiaqpunga and the waking scours archived documentary, poetic inventions, and phantasms of personal imagination. The installation reflects on a lonesome wandering, high in the Arctic, in search of ghosts and belongings left from the famed Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845. Sent as the largest and most technically advanced of its time, the British expedition sought to finalize the Northwest Passage to the Pacific as well as to obtain calculations around magnetic north pole. The story pauses on the deathly silence of the entire 133-member crew by 1847, and gathers momentum as search and rescue expeditions spilled into the Arctic seeking clues to their disappearance.

Just as the ice covers, it reveals

Over 150 years, seasonal freezing and thawing hid and uncovered objects and tragic histories surrounding the expedition’s fate. And as a result, the threaded fingers of a map filled up with intricate coastlines, Inuit populations encountered, and inventions and communication methods appropriated or generated. The western shroud over the Arctic was rent from the globe.

Not here, the white north has thy bones

In the Inuktitut language, inisiaqpunga describes the act of following a lone trail left by an occasional traveler. Inisiaqpunga and the waking seeks not to retell but rather to pursue the emotional voice, the soliloquy and lament, for a tragic narrative.

April Solo shows

2010-03-24T18:37:00.003Z

I will be opening two solo shows in April with new sculptures in both.

Inisiaqpunga and the waking
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA
April 16-June 13
Opening Friday, April 16 from 5:30-8pm
Artist Talk May 16 @ 1pm
http://www.pittsburgharts.org/

Rendering the NORTH
1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA
April 23-May 29
Opening Friday, April 23 from 5-8pm with artist talk at 6:30
http://1708gallery.org/

The tyranny of distance

2010-02-09T03:45:00.006Z

Barry Lopez. Writer. And the ability to display the distance containing the intimacy of the middle ground once he has gifted us horizon and the minute.

Where are you from?
What do you do?
Why are you here?

Three questions posed to him during his extensive travels. And the need to place oneself where one originally did not belong. And the ability to recognize that they do not wish to be you as you do not wish to be them.

The crossing of two sand dunes that left a small dune in their passing, the table of a Yu'pik hunter, the energy of two rivers crossing a city in relationship to the cynicism bred in children when adults can't effectively communicate, and opening oneself to the vulnerability of living an intimate life with nature.

The role of the storyteller and creating patterns so that one recognizes them just as blindly as how all its pieces come together enabling it to become pattern.

Physic's entropy and how cultures recognize it, offering their own significant reactions. the navajo. the maori.

Nature offers us many types of chances at acknowledgment and disclosure- 40 foot waves off the coast of Falkland islands headed towards South Georgia.

The Drue Heinz Lecture series at the Carnegie Museum Hall..................

And when I turned and ran from god's sheet of fog and torrent rain unraveling towards me from the top of Mt. Washington on the Huntington Ravine trail.

And when faced with the Gjøa, Amundsen's ship, I wept.

I see a wooden sledge bearing 9 candles whose wicks are the leashes for 9 bells which carry a Greenlandic kirke.

A synonym for intimacy is confidence.

The refreshment of 2010: Solo show and a new studio

2010-01-20T00:36:00.006Z

The 2010 new year has welcomed in many new and exciting announcements in my life. I have been selected to have a solo show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, a contemporary arts gallery in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh. Having grown up going to see their shows, I am thrilled and honored to become a part of its amazing exhibition history. As my dear friend told me when she heard the news, Keith Haring showed there. So yes, I am quite honored.

As a pre-college student at Carnegie Mellon, I remember going to see my sculpture professor Carlos Szembak's solo show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. I promised myself on that Friday night while gazing at his re-imagined wheat fields and stacks of bread that someday I, too, would have my art within the gallery's rooms. I wonder if this is how Shackleton felt as he read the memoirs of Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridjtof Nansen, whose many accomplishments included crossing into the depths of Greenland. Someday... someday, did he think? The thrill of new territory for an artist is not unlike the adventure of finding one's feet in the first fallen snow for the Antarctic explorer.

I have also set up a new studio and am continuing the Angalavaa series along with a few new sculpture pieces: one for my solo show at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, and two for the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts show. Having not worked as an artist in Pittsburgh before, I am excited to take in the energy of the city and my neighborhood of Lawrenceville and then huddle away in my studio for some long hours and nights.

Yes, 2010 is a good year.

2009-12-03T21:32:00.003Z

I am finally finishing up my new website design. Adding titles, sizes, etc, which for some reason has taken me too long to finish!

Recently I became part of the Pittsburgh Artist Registry, an online database where you can find many many southwestern Pennsylvania artist, writers, performers. It is a project through The Office of Public Art in partnership with the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and the city of Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. The NEA has a hand in it, too, of course. Artists are listed alphabetically and have images of their work, website links, and short artist statement and bio.

http://pittsburghartistregistry.org

Another resource that I have been a member of for the past year is Sermitsiaq, the Greenlandic english speaking newspaper. By subscribing, you receive a weekly emailed newsletter offering short articles about current issues such as the induction of the new prime minister this past early fall, tourist/ mining expansions, and of course all of the climate changes causing disruptions. Sometimes the translations are a bit off but overall it has been an interesting weekly read. Also, this week talks about the Greenlandic movie, Nuummioq, being shown at this year's Sundance Film Festival! The website also offers news in Danish, which can easily be translated into English. I have attached the translation program I usually use.

http://sermitsiaq.gl/english
http://gramtrans.com

Center on Contemporary Art Seattle

2009-11-19T16:37:00.003Z

Two of my photographs from the It Is Never Tomorrow series are out in the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, WA. The show, 2009 Annual, opens tonight 6pm at the Ballard Gallery and runs through January 9, 2010. If you are out in that area, take a look! The show was curated by Jess Van Nostrand, curator at Cornish College of the Arts.

http://www.cocaseattle.org/2009_annual.html

UPDATE

2009-11-09T22:56:00.001Z

So for some reason, my website is best viewed through Firefox right now. Safari is dragging behind. And who knows about Explorer.

2009-11-09T19:51:00.003Z

My timeline for my new website has dragged on for a few weeks now. Thanks for your patience. Sometimes life throws in little bumps that get in the way of a deadline.

I hope to have the new site up and going by this coming weekend. Please come back and visit!

New website design

2009-10-14T03:49:00.003Z

I have decided to redesign my website. It was in need of a refurbishment, some autumn cleaning. I hope to have it finished by this weekend: Sunday night is my deadline. So please stay tuned and check back!

National Maritime Museum's Caird Fellowships

2009-10-10T17:53:00.004Z

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich London offers Caird Short-term Research Fellowships for 2-3 months each year for scholars to do research within their collections. These collections are not small either. They include more than 2 million items, from manuscripts in their library and archive, to prints & drawings, objects for navigation, ship models, maps and ship blueprints. Though my interests fall within their polar collections, some of the past research projects include their slave and abolition collection and women's employment at sea. Basically anything maritime related and British historical. The deadline is quickly approaching- November 1- and is their annual deadline.

My proposal is based around how communication was handled in the polar regions in the 1800's and at the turn of the century. Shackleton used semaphore in the Antarctic to guide sledge teams back to the ship over the high ridges of ice. I am interested in this and other ways in which technology played a role in cold weather communication. Tin cans with notes listing longitude and latitude buried in cairns along Arctic coastlines was a way in which the British adopted an Inuit way of storing stashes of meat in these stone piles. I would like to investigate how these communication efforts changed and evolved as more British expeditions ventured into the Arctic/Antarctic. How were they influenced by the landscape and Inuit, or completely ignored both? How did items, such as sledges and clothing, evolve as well to aid in travel? This topic is one that I briefly skimmed the surface of when I was doing research at the museum two years ago. It is time to go back and revisit it more indepth. The use of nautical flags in my work stemmed from it.

My aim for this research is to create a new series of sculptures/photographs inspired by what I find. Now whether the National Maritime Museum's selection committee will be hip to my idea as a visual artist and not an academic scholar is another issue. But here's to trying.

Currently the museum is showcasing the famed Northwest Passage in an exhibition which runs through January 2010.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/on-display/north-west-passage/

Ulluq: encountering the north

2009-09-30T22:53:00.005Z

My solo show at Cazenovia College in upstate New York opened today. The following are photos from the installation that includes a new sculpture piece and digital c-prints from the 'It Is Never Tomorrow' series.

There are 15 photographs and the sculpture piece is duck cloth, cotton rope, and dowel wood.

Nautical flags each stand for a letter of the alphabet as well as a phrases such as 'man over board' and 'fire onboard'. I used them here to spell out 'Oh death whare is thy sting', which was taken from a personal journal found by one of the John Franklin Expedition search parties out on the ice. The phrase was the final entry discovered next to numerous human bones. And yes, it is supposed to be 'whare' as this was an older form of English.

Jen Pepper, curator of the gallery and professor at Cazenovia college was wonderful to work with and has curated some very interesting, critical thinking shows for the past few years in the space. It has been a pleasure to work with her and her students in setting up this show.

Solo show and new moves

2009-09-24T00:00:00.003Z

I have not written in a few months. This is partly due to moving back to the U.S. from Denmark in August and settling back in. I am now in Pittsburgh awaiting my next adventure.

Next week I install a solo show up at Cazenovia College's Art & Design School gallery in New York. Ulluq: Encountering the North opens September 30, with a gallery talk at 5pm, and runs until October 30. There are 16 photographs from my 'It Is Never Tomorrow' series and a new sculpture piece in the show, the latter I am finishing as I write. The sculpture piece involves sails, roping and nautical flags. I am really keen on the sails and have a lot of new ideas for incorporating them into my work a lot more. I will post some photographs next week.

a few beached whales

2009-06-13T15:16:00.000Z

2009-06-10T09:50:00.002Z

I am reading a book about norwegian and danish trappers and the huts they built in Northeast Greenland from the early 1900's through mid 1950's called North-East Greenland 1908-60: The Trapper Era The author, Peter Schmidt Mikkelsen, assisted in forming a group, Nanok, to deem the huts historically relevant and to do upkeep on them. Some huts are still used for overnight stays by the danish Sirius sledge patrol, who keep watch over Northeast Greenland. The stories are very fascinating and include historical accounts of each hut or station and quotes from the various trappers' diaries who overwintered there. Most trappers didn't spend more than 2 or 3 seasons in Greenland. But as the diary entries reveal, Northeast Greenland left quite an impression upon them.

The book is full of old photographs and newly documented photographs of the same places. Let's just say there were quite a lot of trapper huts up there. And this includes the territorial wars between the norwegians and danes. And then the german nazis who secretly created a few weather stations during the WW2. The author includes charts of how many foxes, polar bear, walrus and wolves were trapped over the decades, number of huts that were built each year, number of trappers who died at each hut, and how much money was made each year from the catch.

The book is very well written and I highly recommend it!

.......................................

New drawings- part of the Angalavaa Series

2009-06-08T12:45:00.003Z

I am in the midst of adding at least 10 new drawings to the Angalavaa:An Archive Tale series.

I am playing around with the idea of a single character sketches.

I have a few beached whale drawings. They might turn into their own series.

Angalavaa: The Collections

2009-04-30T10:30:00.005Z

Collection: Objects of a particular form, things accumulated, group of objects meant to be kept together

One part of my Angalavaa series are the Collections: objects, letters, documents, commercials, etc found in the Arktisk Institut's archive. I photographed almost every item I looked at or translated.

The archive is organized by specific persons, both famous like Achton Friis or regular citizens who donated their family's personal archive, expeditions such as the Danmark Ekspeditionen, or organizations and government agencies such at the Royal Greenland Trade Company.

I tried to organize these photographed items into my own collections such as varde notes, or cairn notes, that were retrieved from cairns found mainly in Northwest to North to Northeast Greenland. And personal correspondences.

Maps and memorabilia and quirky things such as mosquitoes smashed inbetween two pages and water damaged papers.

More to follow in the coming days.

Artist Statement for Angalavaa: An Archive Tale

2009-04-22T12:27:00.002Z

‘There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.’ -Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life

This quote defines how the arctic found me: in a state of curiosity that I had to follow. Starting with American arctic explorer Robert Peary’s photographs from the 1900’s, I became fascinated with the explorers and Arctic disasters and from there to all that was found, lost or returned from the Arctic: the ‘polar archive’. The Arktisk Institut became a pausing point for this archived realm. It carried weight: persons, locations, events, and their aftershocks. Each was not my own memory, but rather an archived memory left for others to learn about.

‘Modern memory is above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the record, the visibility of the record.’ -- Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de Memoire.

The Arktisk Institut forms an intertextual framework for the friction and exchanges that occurred between Denmark, Greenland and the arctic: recorded through personal diaries, photographs, catalogues of Eskimo/Inuit dialects, and much more. They are textures from a common language, forming the archive's theoretical and visual environment: the nonlinear narrative about the Danish encountering the Arctic.

‘…Translation does not become inauthentic because it employs a different language from the original…. There is a significant difference between speaking about other cultures and presuming to speak for them.’ --John Mack’s essay Exhibiting Cultures Revised: Translation and Representation

The psychology behind basements and attics revolves around memory, the forgotten and the imagination: Strange that these spaces are where we normally keep our archives. And history is impatient; it is always ready to collect more and more. We can discuss how archived items retain their value and significance over time but we can only experience this observation by actually opening the archive doors. By lessening the distance between it and us. Every time we open the archive, we must strive to find how it has changed.

‘A memoryscape is constructed by people’s mental images of the environment, with particular emphasis on locations as remembered places. When one relates to the landscape as a memoryscape it becomes alive, meaningful, and personal and embeds person, places and activities in the rivers of history….Memoryscape is often felt rather than verbalized.’ --Mark Nuttal’s Arctic Homeland: Kinship community and development in Northwest Greenland

My approach at the Arctic Institute was not like that of an academic researcher out to gather facts about a specific person and then place them into historical or theoretical context. I did not want to concentrate on one subject or ‘document’ in the traditional manner. Rather I investigated as an artist all aspects of the archive’s contents: I saw browns, ochres, indigo blues and grays. Waterlogged paper, handmade bindings, frayed edges, crinkled flags and smooth paper. They were followed by names such as Rink, Freuchen, and Mikkelsen: Thule, fangersang, and Nansen’s map. I wanted to ‘bring history back to life, giving it a second level of existence’ (Pierre Nora). Sadly these were traces of an arctic that no longer exists.

‘The past becomes a way for people to navigate within and make sense of the present as well as a way to formulate visions.’ ----Frank Sejersen’s essay Horizons of Sustainability in Greenland: Inuit Landscapes of Memory and Vision

This is where the photographs and drawings stem from: my experience navigating someone else’s documented memory. I am an American born in this period, and so a level of inaccessibility will always exist. But within this distance we find emotion: melancholia and fantastic humor within History’s stories to counterbalance the coldness. An alternative memory manifests. My photographs are the archive, sitting in darkness. The photographic collections are gathered-history’s contents. The drawings are the contents seen from a different view: cairns and boats, flags and buildings, books and papers. My figures are sometimes dragging, waiting, carrying, and sometimes encountering. All is not history recorded. Rather they are memory retained from looking and touching, reading and translating, digesting and re-transfiguring. Angalavaa, wandering through the archive.

Angalavaa: An Archive Tale opening, through May 29

2009-04-20T11:59:00.004Z

Thursday was the opening of my Angalavaa: An Archive Tale Exhibition at the Arktisk Institut. We had a nice turnout given that the Arktisk Institut is not used to hosting this type of event. The show is comprised of 10 ink/watercolor drawings and 13 lightjet print photographs. The show continues through May 29.

Arktisk Institut entrance

Bent Nielsen, Director of Arktisk Institut, giving an introduction to the show

Me discussing and answering questions about the concepts and inspiration behind my seven month project at the Institute.

Angalavaa: An Archive Tale

2009-04-13T19:02:00.006Z

Arktisk Institut præsenterer Angalavaa: An Archive Tale- fotografier og tegninger af den Amerikanske kunstner Thea Augustina Eck. Med inspiration fra syv måneders studier i instituttets arkiver udforsker Eck med sine værker arkivernes indhold, særlige placering og æstetik.

Udstillingens titel, Angalavaa, er et grønlandsk ord, der betyder ‘rejse gennem noget’. Eck kombinerer sine erfaringer fra arkivet med et synspunkt, der bedst kan beskrives med den franske historiker Pierre Noras ord: ‘Erindringen...lagrer kun de kendsgerninger, der passer den; og den giver næring til minder, der kan være perifere og teleskopiske, globale eller løsrevne, specifikke eller symbolske.’ Resultatet er muntre, eftertænksomme, fiktive og dokumentariske kunstneriske udtryk.

Angalavaa: An Archive Tale vises fra 14. April - 29. Maj, mandag-fredag, kl. 9.00 - 15.00 på Arktisk Institut, Strandgade 102, København.

Velkommen til reception 16. april, kl. 17.00 - 19.00, hvor Thea Augustina Eck vil være til stede og diskutere sine værker og den kunstneriske proces med publikum.

Udstillingen er sponsoreret af the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Roth Endowment, the Public Affairs Section of the United States Embassy og Arktisk Instituts gæstfrihed.

First sign of Spring in København! Finally!

2009-03-20T13:41:00.003Z

Angalavaa-Wanders through it

2009-03-04T10:32:00.004Z

Here are three new drawings that are part of my new series based on my research in the Danish Arctic Institute's archive.

detail

I am still deciding on titles for each drawing. The tentative title for my show is 'Angalavaa: An Archive Tale'. The Greenlandic word, angalavaa, means 'wanders through it', which is exactly what I did in the archives.

detail

detail

2009-02-18T19:21:00.003Z

My goal for the past 2 weeks was to crank out at least 7 good new drawings. I have done nothing except eat, sleep, think and draw for 11 days. I reached my goal of 7 today. That doesn't count all the mess-ups and crappy ones! I am aiming for 10 drawings for February and at least 5 more in March.

The snow stays in København

2009-02-17T14:22:00.006Z

It began snowing on Sunday and now it is Tuesday and it is still on the ground! This is the first time I have seen this happen since I have been here. As you can tell, this is very exciting for me.

It is cold out there so it is NOT raining. The snow creates a beautiful blue at around 5pm and remains until about 6:30.
So I am staying indoors and enjoying the sun and snow from a warm apartment!

New drawings

2009-02-14T19:11:00.003Z

This week I have been drawing. I am on the first part of the final count down to my show.

The drawings are influenced by the random letters, stories, items I have come across in the Danish Arctic Institute's archive. I am aiming for a series of 10 or 12 drawings.

Chasing the archive, day after day

2009-02-10T20:50:00.005Z

I have been working up in the actual archive space at the Institute off and on for the past 2 weeks. Trying to photograph it in various styles, to evoke different feelings from it. Some questions arise about composition while others are about portrayal.

My process has become all about returning: the more photographs I take of the archive, the more I will be able to wrap my head around what I am doing and why. To turn into an image that which has been kept as precious object over time. It is not a cataloging process. I am not there to 'document' what is kept and stored. But rather to find something within the space, how it is arranged, what is left out of boxes and just sitting on a table and labeled, when does dust begin to settle and where does it land. Is it important to show that this is a Greenlandic- Arctic archive?

It has been refreshing to put the research and writing aside for awhile and concentrate on my photography and drawing.

We have set the date for my show at the Institute: my exhibition will run from April 14 through May 1. It is concurrent with the openhouse that will occur at Nordatlantens Brygge during the 3rd weekend in April. It is exciting to finally have an end date, a horizon line in sight, and also a little scary of course.

Møns Klint

2009-02-02T10:23:00.010Z

On Saturday, a friend and I drove down to the island of Møns, which is the island just south and a bit east of the main island of Sjæland. It took about 1 1/2 hours to drive down, crossing a bridge and lots of tiny villages, farms and fields.

Møns Kint is a national forest and naturepreserve that runs along the length of tall cliffs formed out of chalk and flint. Fossils have been found there from about 70 million years ago. There are also land slides that slowly take out more and more of the cliffs and sometimes part of the trail system.

Here you can barely see a staircase on the bottom of the cliffs and people walking on the beach.

We walked the trail at the top for about 1 hour.

The trail rambled along the edge and some places you could see where the landslides had occurred and would probably occur in the Spring or at some point during a heavy rain. Tree roots sticking up out of the ground and little valleys cut into the hillside from mini waterfalls.

The chalk also formed a white line in the water, from where the chalk had settled and built up from the continuous waves to where the ocean floor began. The water was a pretty light blue because of the chalk buildup.

And then came the stairs DOWN! AND DOWN AND DOWN....and DOWN!! The stairs probably took about 20 minutes to walk down the very steep, little stairs, meandering through the woods.

Finally we made it to the bottom!

And came upon not a sandy beach but a black peddle beach with lots of various colorful stones scattered amongst them. And the waves were very rough that day because of the weather and wind. As each wave receded, you could hear the stones rolling back, clinking against each other as if they were shouting and jostling for space.

Here you can see the chalk and the dark parts in the middle is the flint

There was quite a bit of garbage washed up along the beach and I also kept looking for fossils but found none. I did add to my rock collection but then kept remembering that I had to carry them back up the cliffs in my pocket.

We walked along the beach for about 45 minutes back in the direction where we came from. As we approached the staircase, we realized that that tide was coming in and the staircase, from a distance, looked like it was already submerged in about 1/2 meter of water! But as we got closer, we found out the water wasn't as deep as we had originally anticipated.

And then it was BACK up the stairs!

For some reason, going back up the stairs was easier ...? Not sure why. Even with stones in my pockets. And the wind really picked up the higher we climbed! On the beach, there wasn't really much wind.

This is the section of the trail we covered, starting from the Geo Center and walking along the top out to the Røde Udfald and then back along the beach to the Maglevands Fald.

We walked for about 3 hours. I hope to go back in the summer to see how the colors are different. Also to walk the entire trail and do some swimming in the crazy waves.

Kronborg Slot- Helsingør

2009-01-30T13:59:00.012Z

Last Saturday I visited Kronborg Slot, the infamous castle of the brooding Hamlet and his story of revenge, murder, and death. Located in the town of Helsingør, it sits right up against the waterway that separates Denmark from Sweden. All day long ferries go back and forth between the two countries.

In older times, the Danish King collected taxes or dues from every ship that passed through this waterway.

During WW2, the castle and its buildings were occupied by the German Army as its location was perfect for watching for Russian submarines. After Danish occupation ended, the Danish military took it over and used it for the same reasons during the Cold War. It was only in 1992 that the buildings were no longer used by the military.

The castle still contained some of the original tapestries and narrative paintings of old Kings and Queens.

The casements are still open for the public and are light by random candles placed along the walkways. It is VERY dark and at times I almost ran into the walls without realizing it! The tunnel system is where the soldiers used to live when the castle was in its full use.

Damp, cold and dark, the rooms did not offer much happiness and I can't imagine having to have stayed down there. Even to sleep would have been very dull and depressing.

The castle burned down in in the 1600's and was rebuilt by 1690. The chapel was untouched by the fire.

Also in the basement of the castle waits the sleeping Holger Danske, who will rise again someday when Denmark is in trouble.

Folder A:080, læg 3

2009-01-21T20:46:00.006Z

This essay was written after I came across a diary of a Danish woman in Greenland- #A:080, læg 3, June 1904. The writing is fictional while trying to capture the complexity of her situation- a complete foreigner negotiating her new surrounding.
________________________________________________________________

She is a woman in Greenland strolling amongst dogs and feces. Her husband brought her there and her children cause her to stay. She mends their socks when big toes force themselves free. She gathers ice for water when the pipes are too weak against the weather. At times she mistakes the undulation of the ice for the waves of the cornstalks in October’s wind. She wonders if she misses Denmark. But she can’t remember, as if a northern breath has swept it clean like the fjord in winter, jagged and crying.

She writes home of the animals she has seen: the walrus and its bulging eyes, the seal and its funny hands. The birds migrating in the summer along the cliffs, the eggs they hatch and the eggs that she takes from them. The alpine vegetation she read about living in the Swiss Alps, the willow and the lichen, but she observes them growing here.

She writes about longing: A fresh apple eaten in October picked straight from the tree in Jutland. A cool June rain harkening the grass to reach for the heavens. An even winter sky that allows only a few hours of darkness to cradle slumber and a summer sky that calms its sun long enough to mimic night and nestle the body into rest. She ponders her aloneness when her husband and children have found sleep and she is awake to hear their breathing. She never knew that so many could learn to breathe in the same rhythm.

And she apologizes, for not being more poetic, for too few letters, for complaining, for being too emotional and vulnerable. Greenland is not for the weak, she tries to explain but her Danish handwriting seems foreign to her, out of place and forced in this land of popping consonants. She apologizes for sounding like she yearns for sympathy or a return to Denmark. She is not lying when she writes these things. But she wonders if language will really resolve the complexities that entwine her feelings.

Yet, they do not understand. They read and discuss what she writes, over lunch and dinner, during tea and coffee, when helping each other in the garden, before falling asleep at night. They discuss each sentence, each word and adjective she has used to assemble Greenland into a fixed meaning for them. They wonder why she has told them of so many intimacies. They wonder if she will return as their daughter or if they have lost her to the frozen ice and breath, her constant friends. In their dreams they construct her world, adding blues when she really sees reds and golds, placing feasts with wine on her table where there is none - no trade ship passing to deliver such superb items.

Her radius is simple and she often desires to gaze beyond doors left ajar and condensation on windows. It is always a crevasse or a mountain or a river that obstructs her inland sleepwalking. Winter storms snuff out all inner horizon lines and bring bored visitors to the house for coffee and sugar. The constant rumbling of the fledgling ice falling from the summer icebergs frightens her from wandering too far away. It accompanies her children’s voices threading their way out the school’s windows, around the speckled houses and church, galloping like horses down the hill and into her ears while she sits with her lady friends discussing Sunday’s psalm. She falls back, synchronizing her laugh to the beat of the conversation. Yearning to locate herself amongst the other Danish women finding life in Greenland, she finds only fur-covered ghosts pulling her away to an unknown Greenland.

She sees them in the corners of her house when she prepares dinner. They seek her eye contact and she feigns cataracts. They
brush past her, offering advice though she asks for none. It is time for the white whales to come, it is time for the narwhals to gather, they say. They tell her stories of Sila deep in the sea and her lovely hair scattered with lice. Who will comb her hair now, they ask her? She believes that if she responds to them, she will never see Denmark again. Sometimes she can smell them, their sealskins and hair, dog fur fringed mittens and small bone amulets. She blames her children, sending them to their bath in hope that it will cleanse the house.

And she writes home, to Denmark from Greenland. From a world that exists nowhere else, ever. From a blue shuttered house and polar bear rug. Frozen ink on a winter’s day that she carries to the kitchen, sitting near the stove. Each piece of paper fills with her hopes and her past week, her children and her husband, her neighbors and their families, her weather and her boots, her skirts and her timeline for when she will return to see them again.

They are old. Their waiting wanes. Her letters arrive to an empty window facing Northwest, staring out for her ship, for her stormy return. They fall into their graves looking up towards the sky imagining hare and gerfalcon, ice crystals and green glaciers. Imagining her seated by a fog-filled window waiting for their letters discussing summer jams and autumn rains. But all is too late. The boat cannot break through the early ice. The exchange is not made. The letters are thrown overboard because of failure and embarrassment. Falling to the bottom, they become lost and tangled in Sila’s hair.

And she gives in and dives down deep pushing past seals and whales to comb out their words.

We remember ourselves

2008-12-15T15:28:00.004Z

Archives break up intimacies of the afterlife like an icebreaker creates left and right. We are pieces, small pieces, rising with tide leaving our traces. Volcanoes today and forests tomorrow. Dusty-haired and dirty-jeaned from sludging through life's tauntings. And the archive waits for us, lid open.

The hands of our grandchildren close around us. It was difficult for our children to part with us. So they pawned us to those younger who could not visualize the times we lived in. We were their greatest generation who struggled more, who wisened to life earlier. Now they know good times and we get to know ourselves.

This box contains our passports, that one our sledge flags. Letters to our lady friends are separated from letters to our parents. Photos taken with brother and sister become mixed with photos of our first love. We always kept them detached by false walls. Now their only walls distance them from written words. Even in death we cannot remain whole.

In the attic, in the basement, in the warehouse and closet, we are kept. Pieces of ourselves all around, quiet or tempestuous, muffled by box lids and closed folders. We recollect when we were caught, lifted, turned, trampled, loved, thrown, silent, overjoyed. Finally the silence enables us to gaze at projections of ourselves. And those of others, we now see through the snowstorm, their joys and sorrows. We realize the texture of their chaotic emotions endured as much as ours. And all is kept warm by the fires of memory.

Han længes også efter grønland igen (he also is longing for Greenland again)

2008-12-12T14:15:00.009Z

'Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recordings, the visibility of the image.' - Pierra Nora

'Lieux de memoire originates with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations,... because such activities no longer occur naturally' -Pierre Nora

It has been a while since I last wrote. Since it is now coming towards the end of December, I have begun to wrap up my project. This has been very hard since I think I could spend another year going through the Arctic Institute's archive and not be bored.

The following writing is a fiction piece I am working on for my show in mid January at the Institute. I have attached a few of the photographs, too. I hope to have about 6 essays, both fiction and nonfiction, dealing with aspects of the Arctic Institute's collections and Archives.

To give you background on the writing and to briefly familiarize you on who Hinrich Rink was: He was a Danish scientist who lived in Grønland for over 25 years. He soon became Inspector of South Grønland. He was a prolific writer and researcher and was quite the humanitarian- he was very aware of the intricacies of the Greenlanders' relationship to the Danes. My writing is based on a fictional version of him, after he has died and is living as a ghost in the attic of the Arctic Institute....

Hinrich Rink resides on the 4th floor of a building in Christianshavn. He has always been a letter writer and wonders if his hair needs to be cut, beard trimmed. While diagramming East Greenlandic archaeological sites from memory he worries if he is becoming too similar to his drawings. Hinrich observes the meticulous spiders waiting for a random bit of food to penetrate through the archive’s airtight barricade. In the evening he paces back and forth for sheer enjoyment, when all is silent and the janitor has gone home.

Thumbing through boxes with folders and documents and drawers with drawings and maps, Rink purges his delight by counting how often his name occurs. This originated a few years ago while going through cases from 1840’s through 1880’s. So many letters and drafts and edits of his musings and good tidings and studies. But soon the practice became too easy for it was either he authoring the documents or his colleagues. The 1900’s would be a suitable jump, he thought. It became a challenge: to see if his work, his drawings and words lived beyond his departure from Greenland. Who mentioned him? What purpose were they using his insight from the 1800’s? Was he or his studies the topic of conversation? Despite his humbleness he had always considered his work of the utmost importance. Critical. He celebrated with a drink of schnapps when his name occurred, though it was seldom.

One day he came across a document that had slipped off the ledge of his memory and into the fjord. Waterlogged and dirty, he wondered what had caused its grave deterioration. Opening the folded brittle pages, he peered into his own handwriting, perfect penmanship of a middle aged man and not the nervous handling from an old, old man. Danish writing on one side and Greenlandic on the other - the lists and lists of words congregated into topics such as kajaking and land. The Greenlandic words swirled with the earth and its relationship to humans and to himself, as community, as individual, as wanderer, as hunter, as woman, as child, as dog, as storm and ice floe. Alive on the page Rink observed himself deciphering grammar and structure from Danish to Greenlandic and back again. The Danish words burned quickly away, offering no contoured landscape to ponder, no animal to bait. He quickly closed the pages, becoming self-conscious of himself spying on himself from 150 years ago. The pages shuddered back into their manila folder, back into their black archival box, back onto their metal shelf. And back he went to his nightly pacing.

This incident left him agitated over what else he may have misplaced. What else had gone missing? Old lovers and favourite dogs? Sunny hillsides and drafty houses? What else had disappeared into the brash waters of the fjord? Were they still traceable, leaving fishing line tails to catch? Did these things leave thank-you or ransom notes behind? The sacred pages that had opened this forgotten realm again lay dormant. He continued his usual shuffling of papers, journaling, diagramming, and sweeping cobwebs from his hair when he didn’t keep up with the lady spiders spinning.

Shyly, he began to play a game, though he would deny it. In his shuffling, journaling and diagramming he would open the black archival box and then proclaim how silly he was, for it was not the box he needed. This flirtation continued for a week. By the following week it had developed past opening the box. Now he took out the manila folder only to laugh and quickly repack it back onto the shelf. How long would this game continue, he finally proclaimed in exasperation as the spiders darted away at the commotion!

The next day, in his feigned confidence, Hinrich Rink approached the shelf and purposely took out the sacred folder that cradled the Danish to Greenlandic words. It was lovelier than he had remembered. He seated himself at his desk with its small lamp casting a glow upon the yellow stains. Again he steadily turned each page, willing himself to recall the strokes of his hand once placing the symbols so thoughtfully onto the paper. So many I’s and P’s and Q’s in this language, he observed. The longer he gazed at the two languages the more both wavered between towers and highways, golden grass prairies and vicious tornadoes, a fleet of schooners and a couple on a Sunday stroll. He glided through the lists of words, intertwining his fingers and toes through them, pulling on them to see if they would move and rearrange. But they held fast to their page, their order and lines.

That evening marked a homecoming. Hinrich Rink returned again and again to the archived folder that contained his own handwriting from 150 years before. In it was a letter from an American written in English. The letter explained Alaskan native populations’ dialects and stated the hope of answering all of Hinrich’s questions. Who was to say now? They may have been his questions then but many scholars had come since to ask and answer them over and over again. Hinrich scripted a response to the cordial letter to see how the fellow was getting along. But perhaps he was too late.

‘A’ to ‘B’ to ‘D’, Hinrich Rink tiptoed into the river of his Greenland memory. It was true that many had already flowed so far out into the fjord that he, in his old age, would never retrieve them. He came to feel ’nalusuunerup taarsuanit’ (out of the great darkness of ignorant people). Yet, now, not people but history’s vastness, and he would never find the point where the edges of light came together.

He remembered a time when Atuagagdliutit was young and infant in its circulation. How far it finally travelled along the Western Greenlandic coast by sledge, by boat, by word of mouth! How wonderful its hunting and trading news and stories flowed, filling the night air with the Greenlandic written word, other than the Bible, spoken out loud. He remembered the printing press crammed into his Godthåb home and its urgent thumping voice sometimes saying faster, faster! There is not enough time! Volume by volume the newspaper grew.

He remembered his friend Aron of Kangeq and the gift of color and line that flowed from the paper. The illustrations he imagined through Hinrich’s descriptions of war and fighting. Hinrich remembered the teacher training college built in Godthåb, 1845, and the Greenlanders who fulfilled curious destinies in contrast to their parents. Strange puddles began to appear on the floor and dew settled on the spiders’ webs. Heinrich recalled reading his paper ‘The Results of the Recent Danish Explorations in Greenland, with regards to the Inland Ice’ at the Edinburgh Geological Society’s meeting on 1886 and other papers he presented to this geological society and that historical society. Water began to cause his socks to remain wet all day. And soon the cuffs of his pants. He remembered………….. and ……………………. Soon his nightly pacing became replaced with nightly wading through knee-height floating text and typographies, folders and photos. Still he remembered …………….. and …………………… Soon he kept a towel close by so that his wet hands would not damage the filmy paper documents. Still he remembered …………… and ………………… Hinrich finally realized he could float on his back in the water. The flood was irreversible. It contained no foundation, no levy and no damn. No tree to push up against its banks, its shorelines. All were washed away.

Memory lifted Hinrich’s feet off the wooden floor. He caught hold of cardboard boxes spewing out personal correspondences from Danes celebrating Jule, caught hold of metal shelves releasing index cards of Inuit language dialects, caught hold of drawings and paintings from artists that he did not recognize. He dove to retrieve glass plate negatives already sinking into the papery sludge on the floor. But there was nowhere to keep them safe, unharmed, catalogued! The water, oh, the water of memory! And the memory of water! Cold, Arctic water, shading seal and whale, unlucky hunter and kajak! Memory’s fjord on the move as Spring turns to summer and its solid icebergs clef and birth! Rumbling and melting down and up over him! How Hinrich wanted to forget! Oh, Greenland! There is no way to forget! Jeg længes efter grønland igen!

Danish Crown Prince visits the Arctic Institute

2008-11-04T17:13:00.011Z

Last Tuesday the Arctic Institute hosted the Greenlandic Photography Contest winner presentation, which was co-sponsored with a Greenlandic and Danish newspaper.The Crown Prince Frederick attended to present the first prize to the winner who had been awarded a week long vacation in Copenhagen.

Yes, the Prince received a red carpet!

There was a 40 minute presentation with speeches from the Arctic Institute's director, the Representative from Greenland and Faroe Island. The 12 photos that won various other prizes were then shown. Finally the winning photograph was presented and the Prince handed over a nice bound book to the woman who won. She was given a week vacation in København along with (i think) a digital camera and money.

I got to play photographer for the event! That is the only reason why I was allowed to be there! Everyone else was either an 'esteemed guest', on the board of directors, was a photojournalist for the newspapers, or was part of the tour. Yeah Me!

He was then given a tour of the offices and talked with the document archivist and photo archivist. He seemed genuinely interested in what they were showing him and quite informal in talking with them. He was very charming and sincere.

The program ended with a casual reception back in the conference room.

And at the end when he was leaving, he went around and shook hands with everyone. So I got to shake hands with my first Prince!

A walk in the woods

2008-10-24T12:30:00.010Z

My friend and I drove outside of Copenhagen yesterday after work to this huge park about 20 minutes outside of the city, with a lake and lots of trails.

We started from the Sophiesholm museum's parking lot, which is about 100 feet from the Prime Minister's home. There wasn't a single gate or guard with guns or anything around his house! Just a hedge row! You could have driven right into this driveway and up to his front door! We thought about doing this since he loves America so much, I figured he might welcome me! Or not....

We followed the lake for a while and then cut into the woods and out to the river that runs beside it.

There were a lot of people running on the trails and the weather was that Autumn crisp evening air.

The leaves have really come down here in the past 2 weeks. It was nice to see some actual Fall color in the woods!

Rasmussen's house!

2008-10-10T19:51:00.009Z

Last Sunday, a friend and I went up to see Knud Rasmussen's house. It was really rainy and super windy all day. Rasmussen was born in Grønland from a Greenlandic mom and a Danish dad. He started running sledge dogs at a very young age and when he got older, established the Thule trading post. He made many expeditions around Grønland and eastern Canada. His most famous expedition was the 5th Thule Expedition across the entire Canadian Arctic all the way to Russia. Actually, he was only in the Russian arctic for 24 hours before he was kicked out. During this expedition, he visited every Inuit group living in the Arctic collecting stories, amulets, songs, and at some point had a filmographer/photographer with him. At the beginning of the expedition, there were biologists and archaeologists also accompanying him in the eastern Arctic doing things such as digs at ancient Inuit sites.

His house of course faces Northwest towards Grønland.

Rasmussen is considered a national hero of sorts. He accomplished a lot during his short lifetime.

A bed with a musk ox fur blanket on it. It was rather rough fur.

Death portrait of Rasmussen along with his trusty Winchester.

It finally stopped raining when we were getting ready to leave but then we were able to walk up to the lighthouse and take super wind blown photos out into the ocean.

Nivisarsiaq

2008-09-28T09:46:00.003Z

Maria, that is her name. She came to Norway and Denmark around 1747 or a little before with a missionary Mr. Sylo. She was painted by Mathias Blumenthal a few years after her death and then again 5 years later. She died on her way back to Greenland in Bergren, Norway, which was part of Denmark at the time.

One painting is hanging in the National Museum in Københagen and the other is owned by an unknown Swedish man. Nivisarsiaq means 'young girl' in Greenlandic.

Itivdlersuak- the long crossing

2008-09-25T19:25:00.013Z

The Nordic Art Fair 2008 at the Forum, Saturday Sept 20

Everyday I go to the Institute and it is becoming a second 'home'. I feel very welcomed there and am amazed at the amount of knowledge crushed into such a small building! Bent Nielson, the Director, returned from Greenland on Monday and we had dinner that evening to discuss my research at the Institute. It was a really positive conversation and he is totally onboard with trying to get the archive 'awakened' and utilized in a non-traditional way: To display its value differently than mentioning something from it in a lecture or ph.d thesis. He has his own visions for where he wants to take the Institute and it was great to hear that I can contribute in a small way to that.

So now I am concentrating on 2 projects, and both are in their infancy stage and will be totally different than what I had imagined in the end. The first is a photo+text project about the actual archive and documents-drawings-photographs, etc, within it, mixed with the history of the Institute. The text will be addressing the various things that I choose to highlight but will be not exactly 'museum text panel'. Rather more experimental or creative writing of some sort. Also I want to try to utilize the people involved by short interviews such as Bent, and also Leif, the former director, and Mette, the archivist and whoever else I can drag into my evil plan.

The second project I am still formulating but as of now it will be a photographic series about a Greenlandic girl who finds herself in Copenhagen, lost, and encountering the city. It will combine the past and the present tense. She will go through the stages of an explorer in experiencing the 'sublime'. It is a different sort of 'sublime' that the polar explorers experienced in the Arctic but similar in its stages of struggle, fear, and overcoming obstacles. We'll see! I am still writing up the pre-story for it and reading various texts to try to find my girl character and if she already exists in the archive somewhere, which would be fantastic! In 1724, Hans Egede, a Danish-Norwegian missionary in Greenland brought two Greenlanders, Poq and Qiperoq, to Copenhagen. They performed in their kayaks for crowds in the canals and were given very nice contemporary haircuts. The Institute has 2 portraits of them and there is also one hanging in the National Museum in Copenhagen. But I have not found any women, yet.

I also have been learning about Greenlandic place names and their English and Danish translations. I will be using these, too, to inspire and influence the various photographs I take around Copenhagen. Names such as 'Akalua' = that which is between 2 things, or 'Alativik'= where there is disturbance in the water, or 'Perserautoq' = one that continually drifts, or 'Malartarfik'= where the head is generally bent back. I am really excited over the list I have gathered. They are really beautiful phrases that are really rich in meaning. They have a lot of potential for transforming an image and vice versa.

This is my street- Hollænderdybet in Amager. It is actually way nicer in real life than what this photo presents...

The main street-Amagerbrogade that my street is connected to. You can follow it straight into center city København though it changes names 3 or 4 times.

Today I visited a friend who I met through my roommate, Pia, last week at our scary-movie-monday party. Julia works in the public affairs department in the U.S. embassy. She gave me a small tour of the drab grey building. We ate in their cantina which is totally a restaurant with a professional chef and wine.... She also took me down into their American grocery store! It was completely absurd! They had really bad t.v. dinners and things like toilet paper and paper towels! All things that you can find in Danish grocery stores! But they did have duncan hines cake mix and Jiffy brand peanut butter which you can't get here. (I brought my own HUGE jar of my favorite peanut butter with me, it is sad.) And I guess I should also point out the Dr. pepper. It is mainly for the husbands or wives of the Americans who work there who miss these items, or, perhaps are nervous (?) to venture out in the a ssscccarrrryyy Danish grocery store... I don't know. They didn't have Lucky Charms, though, and even center-city Accra, Ghana, at the nice grocery store they sold them when I lived there is 2003! Well, sold them for the equivalent of 15 bucks!

As I mentioned in a previous entry, the Nordatlantens Bryggen has an anniversary exhibition about the Danmark-Ekspeditionen 1906-1908. Leif, the former Arctic Institute's director, and I walked over there last week to see it. It was the expedition that surveyed the final stretch of Grønland- the northeast section- and where 3 men died. I just finished reading the book written by Ejnar Mikkelson, the man who went back up to northeast Greenland to find the bodies and diaries of the missing 3 men. He and his partner ended up wintering over 2 years in a row and barely made it out alive themselves! It was a great book! Like any polar narrative, it is filled with near survivals, dying dogs, hunger and fatigue, and weather reports.

During this expedition, they did all kinds of scientific studies and collected many specimens.

The Danish artist Achton Friis was also along and did many wonderful landscape paintings, drawings, portraits of each of the men, and watercolors. This photograph is part of the Arctic Institute's photographic collection. They also have the actual painting of the ship that he is making!

cykle, båd!

2008-09-18T21:17:00.002Z

Versus

plants and paintings

2008-09-14T09:44:00.014Z

On Thursday I got a full tour of the building that the Institute is housed in. Mette, who was back from a conference, showed me around and told me more stories and historical facts than I could write down! We went up into the archives and she spent some time showing me a few little drawings and watercolors done by a few people.

After, I joined Leif (pro. Life), the old director of the Institute who holds an honorary seat of course, at the Noratlantens Brygge, the building next to us that houses the Icelandic embassy, and representatives of Faoa Islands and Grønland. They have a show up commemorating the 100 years since the Danmark Ekspeditionen closed the gap in Northeast Grønland in 1906-08 and finished the circumference of Grønland. Three men died on this expedition. I will post some photos later of the show.

We also went on board a schooner that just got back from retracing the Expeditions route! It showed up on Wednesday barked outside the Institute and we got a small tour of the berths, a shot of Cuban rum, and talked for a while with the Captain. Leif had just met him and they are planning to do some event to show the public the ship before is leaves on the 26th.

Friday I joined Leif and his wife on a drive up to the coast to go to the retrospective of a famous Danish artist named Pers Kirkeby at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. It was a very windy day and so the waves were all crashing up along the coastline. The Louisiana Museum is a fabulous museum that was once an old villa that they then added onto.

It had rotating shows plus a great permanent collection.

No photos were allowed at the Kirkeby section of the museum but he did huge paintings, sculpture, drawing, and these interesting brick architectural structures around Europe. I think I liked those the best. Some of his later paintings were intriguing, too. He was trained as a geologist and his work is influenced by this.

We then walked around the rest of the building.

Yesterday I biked around Copenhagen and it again was a very windy day. Only about 60 degrees but the sun was out so it did not feel as cold. My first stop was past the National Museum to see the 5th Thule collection again. Last summer I visited it but I wanted to see if they had changed around the collection. This was the expedition that Knud Rasmussen and 2 other greenlandic Esquimos made across the Canadian Arctic all the way to Siberia. He was trying to establish a theory of how the Inuit basically got to Grønland and their history. The collection is gigantic and amazing full of amulets, kayaks, furs, blubber lamps, needles, goggles, harpoons..and on and on. The museum is free and is focused on peoples around the world and through time.

I then biked over towards the ponds and into Norrebro and then met Pia, my roommate, at her university to get coffee.

She is in the anthropology department which is housed in the university building for Health and something, I can not remember. There are university buildings all over the city, each focusing on a different area of study. Last year, Pia spent a year in San Francisco doing her research on healing hands practices, the non-religious healing of the hands, more based in alternative medicine. That is what she is writing her dissertation on.

After parting ways, I wandered through the botanical garden which is right across the street from her. Lucky!

Shrub Monster!

Arken Museum of Modern Art-Ishoj

2008-09-10T18:18:00.012Z

I couldn't sleep last night, perhaps still jet lag (?), so I stayed up until 3am watching episodes of 'Riget' or as it is known in english, 'The Kingdom'. I only have 2 episodes left and I wish there were more! I've seen the series, by Lars von Trier, in video stores in the States in English. It was a miniseries he did in '94 basically for money. But it's really good! and weird! I'm watching it in Danish with English subtitles, hoping that it will help me get used to hearing danish (and trying to speak it!). Hey, it worked for foreigners watching '90210' in the 90's to learn English! And don't forget the 'Young & the Restless'.

I didn't go the Institute today but instead took the train down to Ishoj to visit the Arken Museum of Modern Art. This weekend is the last for a Nordic photography show that I had read about before coming over here that I wanted to see. It did not disappoint! Many of the artists I didn't recognize, so it was nice to learn more about Nordic artists. The show was great. There was also a surrealist show going on that I wasn't really into, and the museum's main collection was quite good. One video piece by Jesper Just I had seen 2 years ago at the Berlin Biennial called 'Bliss and Heaven'. It is very melodramatic and funny. I didn't know Jesper Just was Danish? Another famous Dane who was in the show was Per Bak Jensen's 'Dreaming Greenland' with its foggy diptych.

These next 3 photographs are taken from the book I bought about the exhibition so the quality isn't very good. Olafur Eliasson had 3 photographs of Iceland. His photography isn't usually shown nowadays, since he got on the color/perception kick.

Two of my favorite artists in the show were Susanna Majuri whose photo was used for the publicity.

and a Finnish artist named Jari Silomaki's 'My Weather Diary', whose photograph + the text gave more to the landscape presented. Beautiful. Thoughtful photographs...

The Museum itself was a crazy building, almost like a ship.

A Lawrence Weiner on the front of the building

A Jeff Koons...from looking down a dark hallway....

same hallway that lead back into the cafe and gift shop...

And the beach was right behind it! Today was a very brooding weather day. It rained a little off and on and so the waves were a bit crazy. Really pretty though.

Amager Strandpark visit

2008-09-08T18:14:00.007Z

Today after I got out of the Arctic Institute I decided to bike to the beach. Looking at the map, it only looked like is was about 2 miles away. Maybe even less. So off I went! The bike paths in the city make life so much easier! I'm sold!

The beach is called Amager Strandpark and is actually a long skinny island with pedestrian bridges connecting it to the 'mainland', which is also an island....

I biked out to a little jut of land out from the main walk/bikeway. On the right you can kind of make out the bridge I biked across to get over to the 'beach' part.On the left is some sort of building for swimming I think. I couldn't really tell.

I found these! Shrimp tails in a glass jar! Of course!

I biked down the main path of the beach and parked my bike so that I could walk out close to the water. I sat there for some time watching a few sailboats and also a few huge ships go past

There were quite a few of these little jelly fish.

This is the view looking back towards town. There were quite a lot of people jogging or biking or taking walks with their families. Some people also were naked swimming.

Copenhagen Fall 2008

2008-09-06T19:26:00.014Z

So I don't keep up with this blog much. But I will be writing again because I have returned to Copenhagen to the Arctic Institute where i was last summer for 4 days. I am here on an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship along with funding from the Roth Endowment. I am living in Amager (south east section of Copenhagen) off of Amagerbrogade (the main street running down Amager) from now until end of December. I am doing more polar research but concentrating on the Danish in Greenland and eastern Arctic.

I have been here for 3 days and today (saturday) was an open gallery weekend in Copenhagen but I was unable to find many of the galleries that were listed. So I wandered the city, which wasn't so bad : ) The weather held off and it didn't rain like it was supposed to. I went from 90 degree weather in Ann Arbor to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Big difference! Especially with the sea breeze, it is so nice!

below are a few photos from my wanderings today and also where I will be working, along with a few curiosities. This city is so beautiful and interesting to look at. The people are just as interesting.

The Arctic Institute in Christianshavn

My desk is the one on the right in the front that is empty...so far...

The swimming pool in the canal at Islands Brygge which is the section next to Amager where I live.

Famous Magasin department store in Kongins Nytorv (a big plaza)

The old opera house and theatre in Kongens Nytorv

The new opera house along the canal

The Kunstindustrimuseet or rather the industrial design museum

A super hot & comfy chair by Donna & Bambino

Newspaper chair

What I call a 'sludge' chair by Gunnar Anderson

A group of chairs designed by Arne Jacobsen

I will continue posting things that I am seeing and also will discuss the research I am doing here. My aim is to create a few new bodies of work off of the research that I will do this fall, as well as to get better at my Danish!

MFA Thesis show

2008-03-21T17:14:00.010Z

Here they are!

Elevated wooden tables with two porcelain spoons on each

Double black sail with map-net and fan that makes it shiver

You can see better quality images of the actual photographs on my website- theaeck.com under the 'It Is Never Tomorrow' series in the photography section.

MFA thesis art show

2008-03-20T18:38:00.009Z

Saturday night was my MFA thesis art show at the Riverside Off Center in Ypsilanti, MI. The space was great to work in, save the green walls, and is a historic building. A lot of my family and friends came in from Pittsburgh and Boston to celebrate with me! Not many faculty/staff from the School of Art &Design came but that was to be expected. It was great to have the work seen by others since I had a lot of fun making making it! The weekend was a complete whirlwind and Matt and I stuffed six comrades into our tiny apartment. Good times...

Me and the Mayor of Ypsi!

My graduate dean on the left and my favorite professor, Anne Mondro, in the middle

My best friends from out of town

The fam

I will post photos of the artwork later this week. I still need to document it. If you want to see some of the photos I used check out my website in the photography section under the 'It Is Never Tomorrow Series'. The sculpture piece aren't there but most of the photos are. (www.theaeck.com)

It Is Never Tomorrow

2008-03-18T18:23:00.006Z

It has been a long time since I have written. Wow! Since October! A lot has occurred since then. I have been invited to show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA in their 'Polar Visions' show as it is tentatively called. The show opens in July and will be up for a year in the Art & Nature gallery of the museum. The show focuses on artists working with contemporary issues about the Arctic. I am creating a set of 4 new photographs for them in the same vain as my 'Elsewhere Series', using the toys, fabrics, and strange angles to approach the Arctic's environmental concerns.

On Saturday night was my MFA Thesis art opening at the Riverside Off Center gallery, which is owned by the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, MI. The show, 'It Is Never Tomorrow', consists of 13 photographs and two sculpture pieces. I received a Rackham Graduate Student Research Award to financially make the work! There are 20 photographs in this series and you can see some of them on my website under the 'It Is Never Tomorrow' photography section. I will post photos in the next few days from the opening night. It will be open until March 29, Tuesdays 12-4pm, Thurs-Sat 12-4pm.

Also, I have been awarded one of the American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowships for Fall 2008-2009! I am very excited and will probably head out to Denmark in mid August and stay until December. I wrote this grant with the same premise as I wrote my Fulbright Grant: Arctic representation in Danish Archives, using the Arctic Institute and Danish Polar Center in Copenhagen to create a series of drawings and photographs based on the archives and research. I am still waiting to hear back from the Fulbright Commission as to whether I have been selected. I won't find out until end of April! Stupid waiting. At least I made it through the first round.

Signal and Sign

2007-10-01T23:30:00.000Z

Nautical flags represent letters of the alphabet as well as 'signals' such as coming into port, carrying hazardous cargo, etc. I'm working on a series of paintings using these flags. I have a set of quotes from people and a second set that are a conversation between two lovers.

'Like wooden socks' - quote from Gijs Bakker of Droog design who was in Ann Arbor last Wed/Thursday giving a lecture. This quote was in response to an absurd question asked after his lecture about car design.

'Had we lived' - quote that begins Robert Falcon Scott's final diary entry on his journey back to basecamp after not being the first to the South Pole. I am working on a few sculptures featuring parts of his final statement, which was later morse code sent to England and broadcast all over the country.

'He forgot'

'She stands'

These paintings are going to be turned into actual flags strung across a space. I am still deciding whether they will be inside or outside- what type of landscape I want them to have.

2007-09-21T22:34:00.000Z

Here are a few new drawings that i have been working on and are up in two shows right now. The drawings are done with resin and inks and are a response to the Greenlandic photographs I saw this summer.

Raise your flag

2007-09-13T16:04:00.000Z

I have exactly 5 days left before I hand in my grant to travel to Copenhagen next year. It has drastically changed as I though it would. No longer concentratin on Knud Rasmussen, I will be working with the entire Arctic Institute's collection along with the Danish Polar Center's photographic collection and hopefully the Danish National Museum's ethnographical collections. The Arctic Institute is very excited about my project and have been absolutely wonderful. I am also going to apply for an American-Scandanavian Foundation grant as well but that isn't due until October...thank god...

I am back to teaching classes and the new school semester. Yesterday I gave a brief presentation of my work to my group of 22 senior students along with my fellow grad student Sara Blakely who works in graphic design and animation. She does amazing work and I wonder how she is surviving this grad program?

I think I prefer the summer. It is already chilly in Ann Arbor but at least the skies are still blue instead of Michigan grey. But the tree outside my house decided to get naked: it dropped almost all of its leaves in the past few days. This has me quite sad. There is no Fall color, even though Michiganders keep telling me there is... Nothing can compete with the rolling hills of the northeast or even Pennsylvania.

I am working on a series of sculptures that are using weather balloons as their buoyancy and the sky as their canvas. I am quite excited. They are dealing with such things as Scott & Amundsen's rush to the SOuth Pole, the lowering of ponies onto the Arctic landscape, and pulling one's igloo behind them wherever they may go.

The Bjork concert in Detroit on Tuesday night was another inspirational moment. Though i was a bit disappointed by her stage design. She had a few small monitors that showed her dj's hands the entire time BUT she did have an all woman 20 piece horn section. And no costume changes? I was a little sad but her voice and choice of songs made up for it.

ignore the figure in the corner, they're just the anthropologist

2007-08-02T20:04:00.001Z

I am in the midst of writing a grant that will hopefully allow me to go back to Copenhagen and make work using the Arctic Institute's archives. Mainly the Knud Rasmussen collection from his Thule missions. The one I am most invested in is the Fifth Thule mission which set Rasmussen across the Arctic, from his Greenland base of Thule to the Russian coast. First he spent a year with Peter Freuchen, Therkel Mathiassen, Kaj Birket-Smith, Helge Bangsted, Jacob Olsen to excavate ruins and talk with the people who lived around Baffinland and Danish island. His intention behind the mission was to record a people in a state of transition and to engage the idea of the original migration of the Eskimo. What is interesting if you pull back the lens, is that western Europe was also on the verge of up upheaval and transition. His expedition, whose official title was 'The Fifth Thule Expedition- Danish Ethnographical Expedition to Arctic North America' was from 1921-24, very critical years in Europe. He visited, accompanied by Anarulunguaq and her husband Iggianguaq, every small ethnic group scattered across this vast landscape collecting artifacts, stories, and advice. Word spread: at times, before he had even made it to the next group, the news of his endeavors had already reached new ears. He mingled with medicine men and anyone who would offer him their stories, even the women and wives.

My interest in this has to do with cross-disciplines and telling stories from afar, something that both artists and anthropologists know a lot about. In my previous writing, I liken the work of myself as artist to that of an anthropologist or historian but with more allowances for the blending of facts and fictions. Something that I didn't touch upon was the idea of situational knowledge and how new genres of anthropology are not afraid of the using the 'I'. Artists have never shyed away from neither the personal nor the 'i' when making artwork. But this has been tougher for anthropology, a discipline rooted in the sciences, which often demands a certain tenor of academic voice in order for it to be legitamate. This is even despite the fact that the anthropology is affecting the history of the subject matter they are studying while trying to ignore the fact that they are standing in the same room.

As one of my professors, Dr. Ruth Behar, approaches it, there is room for the vulnerable observer in the same landscape. How can we approach personal accounts, diaries, fiction books set in specific time periods and particular places and not pull knowledge about people and why they do the things they do from these 'other' sources? The arts thrive off of this: From Genteleschi's master painting of Old Testament stories to Shirin Neshat's photographs of women and islam. The polar archives at the Institute will hopefully allow me to do just this: situate myself in the Copenhagen landscape as a vulnerable observer of a collection that has fallen asleep deep in the archives. All it needs is a little coaxing to re-energize it from its 80 year sleep.

My grant will probably culminate just as the International Polar Year is winding down in 2009. This is ok but it has me realizing how long a timeline it is for grant writing, from when you submit it to when you find out yea or nay. Going into my thesis year, i'm sure I will have many other committments to diverge my attention. There is a key, the artist-as-researcher, that I was introduced to by the determined professor Jennifer Pepper the very first semester of my undergraduate career. I hope to smuggle it into the classroom setting this year when I team teach the senior undergrads. As Clifford Geertz said, "You put yourself in its way and it bodies forth and enmeshes you".

2007-07-21T20:24:00.000Z

The Ann Arbor Arts Festival is in its final 1 1/2 hours. After 4 days of Val Cushing ceramic vessel look alikes, easter colored pastel landscapes, home address painted tiles, ribbon and streamer crowns, and arm thick glass 'things' all on hyper-drive, I have to say that bottled water is probably in the lead in terms of 'Art & Crafts vs. ________'. If I had sold bottled water for 75cents instead of $1 (at all the consession stands), I would have pulled the rug out from under the stock market and the local boyscout troop. Next year...

Besides being almost taken out on my bike by a craft-blinded pedestrian, I fully support the festival. Seeing so many people walking! All day! and not just from their car to the grocery store or the car to their house or around their house on the way to their fridge. Walking and looking like they enjoyed it. People actually took advantage of the Ann Arbor bus system, who did an excellent job of shipping them in and out of the downtown area from the various outer areas. For many children, it may have been the first time they rode a bus. New experiences, exercise, and people trying to sell the outcome of one of their most primal human instincts that is always surpressed in the U.S. past the age of 8: the act of creating and making. Despite not being thrilled about much of the work I saw, I respect and am humbled at the shear magnitude of booth after booth of people (unknowingly?) beating our American educational system, government, and mainstream society telling them not to 'make' but to 'buy'. Though many were buying, it sure beats framed art from Ikea.

2007-07-16T04:08:00.000Z

After being back for two weeks from my trip, I am still going through my photographs: numbering, naming, categorizing, copying, printing, drawing, cataloguing. My computer is my archive and I am the archivist still configuring how to dictate the information I have been given. By city? By date? By formal gestures of line, perspective, pattern? Alphabetical by person or place? By theoretical meaning? By dichotomies? By social significance? The arrangement seems to move everytime I go into a folder and see the visuals I took. How quickly I forgot what I had collected!

And magnetic north is moving. The photograph of the map presented is from the Fram Museum, Oslo showing the progression of when Captain John Ross (1831) first took the magnetic calculations then Amundsen (1904) and all the way up until 2006's calculations. It is projected that soon the north will be closer to Russia, the northeast passage, then to Canadian waters. I wonder how that will effect Russian vs. U.S. relations?

Matt, my partner, is curating a show in Ann Arbor titled 'Studio in the Lab' in September. Investigating the intersections within the arts and the sciences, I hope to submit some work involving the images and writing from my research trip. How a visual artist reimagines and represents history/ anthropology/ politics/ cultural studies offers many chances and allowances for bending and of course reinvestigating the academic and social rules. I think of Chris Olfili's massive (and glittery) paintings, Kara Walker's installations of power structures during the American Civil War, Zhang Huan's facial 'Family Tree', Coco Fusco performance with Guillermo Gomez-Pena in the cage as modern day savages, or Song Dong's gestural 'Stamping the Water' performance/photograph piece. These isolate fragments of cultural understandings and translates them. The artists ask questions without needing to preliminarily bend to a hypothesis. They aren't concerned with answers. Through curiosity, they ask what might occur.

I hope to approach my photographs in this way. Gleaning from anthropology, history, intuitive formal gestures: the other 'sciences'. To hover the images while offering the viewer clues as to where the points may end up.

Turn Left, right here...

2007-07-06T14:16:00.000Z

It seems like I have directed you to some wrong websites:

www.dpc.dk
for the Danish Polar Center

and

www.arktiskebilleder.dk/
for the Arctic photo archive

go to the right side of the page under the word 'fritekstsøgning' and do the following searches if you are interested:
Christian Bendex Thostrup
Søren Hansen
Tegninger (this means drawings)
Morten Pedersen Porsild
Danmark Ekspeditionen
Thule Ekspeditionen
Knud Rasmussen

'If on a Winter's Night, a Traveler' ...

2007-06-30T13:51:00.000Z

"To define the present in isolation is to kill it" - Paul Klee

_____________________________________
I am not sure how to end my letters to you. To offer a quote and perhaps a few more fragments of my long event? Is that enough? I ask myself.
It is with a certain unsurity and hesistancy: returning home should always hover between relief and doubt. I found Ann Arbor quite the same yet warm and green. And within an hour, I caught my breath in landlocked suspense, missing the sense of water, of a fjørd, a route, if needed, and the possibility that an ocean current could carry off my past. I carried my objects back with me in addition to a few I had traded for: a Norwegian blanket, native food such as chocolate and candy, two Danish designed spoons, a pair of London shoes, and some random items that one can collect on foreign lands. The maps that guided my travels also allowed for my return voyage accompanied with filled notesbooks of data and narrative imagery of first hand experiences.

The movement of people across landscapes, all landscapes, has always eclipsed what one assumes to be their limit. During the past 1 1/2 weeks in Oslo and København, my nordic past awoke through the people and perhaps the assistance of few old relatives' ghosts hovering about me. I think if it weren't for a few living people who love me here, I may have decided to stay on with those old ghosts, re-awakening what my relatives once did by coming to the U.S. 100 years ago.

I don't think I am ready to turn my back on what my grandparents and relatives began. Weighted in their gestures is the a spacial sense of 'home', which can be created anywhere if given the time and patience. Borders are always built: we may unconsciously want them there. They serve their purpose, at times, to give us the freedom to remain in one place.
And in my usual thought pattern, I believe that there is still time to migrate,

to flock where one feels absolutely possessed with the knowledge of an open polar sea route.

I have decided to continue my letters to you. They are from home though and not from abroad. But I think the act of writing is often from far away. And there are always great distances to cross.

___________________________________________________

View outside my bedroom window in København at 11pm at night, still light.

The National Museum in København, Eskimology department in their Ethnographic wing.

Goggles used in Greenland to aid hunters so that they can see in the blinding summer light reflections off the snow and ice.

Shoes dug up in an old section of København a few years ago.

A newer artifact deserted for the future to someday dig up.

And where it may quite possibly end up.

Kopenhavn- the archive vs....

2007-06-26T18:43:00.000Z

I am on my last stop of my trip: Copenhagen! At the Danish Polar Center on the small island of Christianhavn in the center city's south end. My flat is actually about one block from the center, which is so fortunate.

I have met with two people, Kirsten is the photograph archive librarian and Annika is the prints/painting archivist. I have been there for the past two days and have realized that it is a whole other monster: Greenland and the Danes.... It has its own history, problems, representations, anthropological experiments and field work (including very interesting eugenics field work done in 1883-85, 1885-88 of both Eskimo Greenlanders and the Danes in Denmark, complete with amazing photographs, by Søren Hansen, an anthropologist,). And I know close to nothing, save a few names and artists, about any of it! But I have learned a lot in the past two days based on the little information that I did know and two very good archivists to assist me and offer up any information that they know of names, places, interesting stories or situations. Their photograph collection is incredible and the years 1860-1930 are all on a public database. This is one of the key things I have been going through. I will post the website of it at the end, for it is worth just checking out except that it is only in Danish. I will include a few names to enter into the database so you can see what I have been looking at, too.

Grønland has been a colony of Denmark since 1721, and so they have had their share of a difficult relationship with missionaries, 'eskimos', the 'Danes', the 'Greenlanders', the anthropologists and scientists, government officials...like any colony. Everyone seems to have had their own agenda when it came to the huge island.

The archives at the Polar Center are just that: an archive of Danish polar history, across the vast arctic and in Grønland. They (the archives) are rarely shown publicly and the center does not have a public education department that would host school children on fieldtrips or anything like that. This is really too bad because a wealth of information is resting in the attic, just like there was at the National Maritime Museum in London. So much that is never publicly displayed. Are these archives dead? The question that came to me while looking up on their 6th floor, which is where everything is carefully packaged and placed on shelves, is if an archive is not shown, then what is it considered? It hovers in this interstitial space that is neither pre- or post- museum for it may never even reach the museum. It is no longer living because the artifacts or photographs have been taken away from the field, away from where they were found. They are not dead in a museum display either. The only people to acknowledge their existence is the archivist, that which has housed them there. And then the occasional researcher, looking for something specific within the archive. The artifact in the archive gains its significance through its personal tag with date/number/name/description it has been gifted and its computer database or binder accompaniment. But without this tag, is it just junk? Hoarded up in an attic, the top floor, or in a basement, as most archives are placed? Architecture determines a lot about importance. Bathrooms on the ground floor of houses, along with kitchens, and bedrooms on the second floor or towards the back of a house. In the Somerset House in London, originally the important offices were on the ground floor with the best furniture and from there up it just became cheaper and the ceilings lower. We constantly act as history's witness by visiting museums, forts, au/biographies, government buildings, op-ed pages in newspapers, and churches as tourists, to give a few examples. Yet, who is the archive's witness besides the archivist?

Why do we choose to keep fragments of clay pipes? Is it an act of salvation, a gesture of saving, even if we are not directly connected to that which we have dug out of red dirt, found in a cave, chiseled out of a glacier, tripped on in a jungle? I recognize that we would like to hope that we are getting 'better' as humans. This I am not so sure about and I am ok with that. I can still drink my wine at night. But our things, our possessions, they surround us, shroud 'us' at times, who we as people, as creators in the world are. Is it the archive that does not allow us to move past our histories? Our physical landscapes determine our objects, too, which then shape who we, individually and societally, morph into. I do not know how to use a sledge because I was not born in the snow and ice. I use a sled for winter fun, leisure instead of work. Travel moves objects around the globe more easily than even 50 years ago.(study abroad college programs, cruises) I am bringing back 'foreign objects' that I hope to keep as part of my personal history of this research trip, along with my personal diary I kept and my public notebook and my computer documents and digital photographs, which are public and some personal. I have created my archive, my collection, my personal historia of a young single woman american artist traveler who left her partner at home with their kitten. Now I will have to decide whether to place my archive in the basement or attic?

www.dpk.dk
and
www.arktistebilleder.dk - go to the right side of the page under the word 'fritekstsøgning' and do the following searches if you are interested:
Christian Bendex Thostrup
Søren Hansen
Tegninger (this means drawings)
Morten Pedersen Porsild
Danmark Ekspeditionen
Thule Ekspeditionen
Knud Rasmussen

Oslo, the second part of the expedition

2007-06-20T17:24:00.000Z

i give a howdy from Oslo! I am staying in the city for four days. Tomorrow, off to the maritime museum and to see Amundsen's Fram, all by way of ferry through the fjord.
I will write more tomorrow. Since i am at a hostel now, I won't be able to upload my photos. Too bad, because I have some great shots from the prime meridian,greenwich! And of the lovely Somerset House, which had the offices of the Admirlty ad the Royal Society, shown to me by the wonderful Professor Lambert, who gave the second Freeze Frame lecture at the museum.

2007-06-17T19:05:00.000Z

On Saturday, my brother William and I took the train outside the city to Cambridge. The ride was quite beautiful, going through farmland and fields full of little wild poppies. The weather was again moody and undetermined, and never fully made up its mind all day, to rain or shine, and so it did a little bit of both. Our journey was to see the Scott Polar Research Institute, which is Cambridge University's polar studies department.

The building is dedicated to Sir Robert Scott, the great Antarctic explorer who I have mentioned before because he died on Antartica

and managed to write down his final 'goodbye and god-speed' to the British public, which instantly made him into an icon.

The Institute has a small museum, too, which is full of Scott, Shackleton, and Franklin memorabilia, just to name a few.

Such 'Scott' things you will see there as a visitor are:
A very old biscuit...

goggles fashioned after the Inuit's...

A medicine and needle kit brought along by Scott...

And ice cleats worn by one of Scott's men

Such things you will find from Franklin's expeditions are: Franklin's Silverware! How exciting!
With the family crest! These were traded from the Inuit by Dr. Rae and a few other search parties.

Also, they made stereoscopic images from the Franklin artifacts that were put on public display

Locket with Lady Jane Franklin, owned by Captain Markham, one of the many Captains who went out searching for Franklin and crew, which I found a bit scandalous!

They also had some publicity posters for the explorers' lectures they had to give of their exploits: here is one for the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who never liked giving them but had to in order to raise funds.

A porcelain place setting of an 'arctic scene'.

This postage stamp of Roald Amundsen.

My photographs of these objects are not the best since they were all behind glass. The Institute also had information on their contributions for IPY (international polar year).

I have two more full days left in London! My time here has quickly gone by and on Wednesday I fly to Oslo, Norway to begin my Norwegian Quest, which will only last 4 days.

I'll meet you at the Cemetery gates

2007-06-17T18:39:00.000Z

Quite fitting with Friday's brooding weather, I went to Kensal Green Cemetery to visit a few old friends: Captain John Ross, Captain Edward Inglefield, Captain McCormick, and Captain McClure. And definitely not to forget, Lady Jane Franklin.

First stopping in at the small office, I got a plot map and a list of where they were each buried, thinking that in the midst of all the graves, that I would be able to find theirs.

This was not the case...

The only grave, even with a map in hand!, was Captain Ross's grave,

which was quite exquisite with an anchor and chain.

And Lady Jane's grave closed to the public in a mausoleum as I was told by one of the cemetery workers. But there were some other exquisite graves or tombs that I photographed, which sort of made up for the fact that I couldn't place my plastic red rose on her grave.

Yes, that is a sphinx on the right side...

No, it is not the turtle

2007-06-15T09:41:00.000Z

There is something about finding what you have been searching for: But not exactly what you have been searching for, rather, what has come to represent that which you have been searching for. A representation, an object, a thing that is not the actual thing, but the stand-in, the surrogate, the child that you weren't expecting to have or find. Your rune that allows you to catch your breath and stay frozen in the moment: a projection caught. You see the thing and you catch yourself becoming overwhelmed at the immensity of what you are seeing, staring, gaping at. It may have no significance to any other person, and perhaps once it didn't have significance for you either. But at that moment, at that instant, it has purpose, motive, and you partake in its energy.

For me, it was Captain Nares' sledge, which he used in 1876 during his arctic expedition. Rather, what his crewmembers used for it is not known which of his sledge parties used it as there were a few. This expedition had the most accounts of scurvy in all of 19th century polar exploration, even more than earlier expeditions. Coming upon this sledge was not with the intention of seeing specifically this sledge but rather seeing an example of a sledge. It just so happens that Captain M'Clintock designed this sledge during the 1850's for his expeditions: It represented the past-past, not just the past. It represented an evolution and multiple design changes that M'Clintock made. It probably represents a few other things, too, but that is not why I found significance in this object. I had a moment: these things are not easily understood or explained. Seeing this sledge across the expansive storage room, I almost cried. Amidst the sealed objects and ship bells, I gasped and had to catch my breath. And even now, I can't stop thinking about it. Did I really see it? I keep asking myself. I have the photographs to show that I stood in front of it and spent time with it, but I feel greedy. I wanted more time with it. I wanted to spend the day with it, the week with it. In fact, I want it in my house, to always see it. My photographs only magnify my miscomprehension, my muddled feelings towards the sledge.
Could it be defined as a religious experience? A spiritual experience? Perhaps. At least in my relationship to either of those two things, I would say that this sledge's energy is the closest thing I've felt to an 'awe' moment, which usually occurs during moments of personal divine reckoning, in a very very long time.

We find significance in text written by a person on a page, we build our own meaning of what they are saying, we carry this with us, perhaps memorizing it and making it a mantra that we pull out from time to time for lectures, dinner parties, romantic moments, discussions with children (or adults), and personal moments when we need that little bit of encouragement we once found in a book. These things that we construct for ourselves give back to us. They are like little wisps of nothing, perhaps a piece of shoe leather broken off a snow boot found in 1859 in the frozen arctic: it is a piece of trivial junk that manages to have power within its own insignificance. A passing comment, the low dense background rumble from the timpani during a symphony, or the piece of gum your grandmother always gave you at that symphony: your senses awaken and it all rushes back. You see that particular color and it floods you, pulling you under its currents to push you to the bottom of its ocean gorge. A deep well: from a sound, a color, a smell, a folded page, a photograph, a piece of long red hair found on your shirt one year later.

The weight of a sledge was perhaps 800 pounds once it was steeped with provisions that might have to last for thirty days out on the ice. Each man might have to pull twice his weight, every day, even on a bad day. British sledges weren't like Inuit sledges: they didn't ice their rails since they didn't know that this would make it easier. That was Amundson's role in the story of the Arctic. The British gained their knowledge about sledges from personal experience and from the Norwegians. Earlier on, they did not use dogs but instead 'man' power and then later kites and sails. They used dogs intermittently but not as much as they could have. They finally really learned how to drive sledges using dogs towards the end of the 1800's. The dogs were just more mouths to feed, so perhaps that is why they didn't use them at first? Or they were scared since that is what the 'natives' used? Or perhaps they didn't see the potential in them? Or perhaps they saw it as animal abuse? Though these were not what we now know as the American Huskie, these dogs were probably cross breed with wolves and traded from the Inuit. I am just speculating, I don’t know these things for certain and currently aren't too interested.
The problem with my photographs of the sledge and with the experience with being next to it, is that I felt rushed. One never wants to be rushed when they are having a divine experience. They want to feel relaxed and at ease in fully realizing every detail of the experience. Seeing the sledge, I felt rushed, timed, that I only had a few minutes to document and then move on. To know its personality and the type of each leather knot tied. Did I waste those few precious minutes, I ask myself now? Was there more for me to actually see? Was there more for me to realize about the 'event'? Did I miss something such as a smell or shaft of light marking a secret part of the sledge that I didn't see because I looked away for a moment, adjusting my lens or moving the metal ladder or…. I had the 'awe' moment, yes, but did I fully take advantage of the awe moment? I'm not sure. Are we ever able to fully capture every instance of such an occurrence or do we come to reconstruct them later in our mind, and evolve them into what we then say as 'Ah, yes, that was it, just like that. It occurred just as this and then that'? We process our language either out onto a page or for the aurality of another person. The 'awe' seeks a witness: Someone or thing to declare it as factual within our personal lives, as possessing a life of its own. And the event is formed. The restructured step by step processed to a fruition of meaning.
Walking home alone from dinner with friends, one of the red foxes of London crosses in front of me, hovers and then runs along. Pendrell Road, SE4 77W, 10:30 in the evening, walking back towards home, alone and missing you, Dundalk Rd and a house filled with guests, London in cold June: 'You never told me there were foxes in London', is formed into a poem, into meaning. It immediately possesses a voice of its own, singing to me. Capturing moments like on a cold January, it was so early morning blue outside when I came down to the kitchen at 6:30am, and going to the fridge, pulled out an orange: South African Midnight. Stunned at the sink to read a label such as this, on such a blue morning in my pajamas, alone in the kitchen, you upstairs asleep, and January's kiss on the trees.

These instances hold us together: They keep us, like water in our bodies, intact, in check, fluid in existence. Mundane activities of the hands keep us going at times: They let us continue when other things seem to want to prevent us from moving. There was a time when all I wanted to do was to use my hands in clay, without firing it. The thought of firing it froze me, scared me, to see something stop moving, so permanently, so fixed. I'm sure no one else in my art department had this fear, as they all seemed quite flexible in lending their time towards the lapping fires of the gas kilns that I deemed quite deathly in their ability to snuff out water. One could not turn back after a firing, as was evident of all the clay shards thrown into the rubbish out back behind the ceramic department: a graveyard formed every week before the garbage men came to pick up this funerary pile. I couldn’t get myself to partake in it. So I did my own thing and mixed clay with other materials viscous in nature that enabled them to slump and bend and be cut with an exacto knife, or left to crumble in their own delicacy. It seemed quite natural for me to leave them within the impermanence of the moment. And my undergraduate honors thesis reflected this shift in thoughts and the world: geological rock formations, birthmarks, personal anecdotes about 'home'.
And I still find myself within this realm of deceit: it is a tug-of-war game, really, that many don't seem to mind. It is not easy to move over constantly shifting ice floes or packs, where one has to repeatedly calculate their longitude and latitude, even when standing still. So close to the earth's axis of rotation is a remarkable thing. Activities are performed quicker, such as dressing in the morning, not because of the cold but just to catch up with the slowness of the equator. The sledges pulled would form part of that daily routine, as well as various scientific instruments that were packed onto the sledge, and, if you were so lucky, random Franklin crewmembers' personal objects that you found along your way, gems to be brought back to England, and perhaps something small for yourself. I wonder about the bones of John Irving, the only named crewmember to be buried on British terrain. Which sailor placed his bones into a box or were they wrapped in cloth? Holy relics, christened with polar ice and wind: those sensational bones, exulted on a sledge, a M'Clintock sledge, whose pallbearers still had to defy scurvy and weather on their way back to the ship, to defy their dwindling rations. Did the sailors hear the rattling of John's bones as they lay awake, hammocks in mid pendulum swing? Those protesting bones: because they were traveling in the opposite direction of the North West. Returning through the Baffin's Bay tunnel from whence those bones came with such optimism: Water all around them, but not enough to mold their flesh together again. Is he lonely, feeling at odds in his British cemetery, displaced?
There are many things at odds with themselves that lay within the confines of a museum's storage: ship models, anchors, pieces of gold trimmed railing, masts, silk handkerchiefs, shoes, clay pipes, sails, shreds of clothing. Like criminals they are trapped without visitors, in gang rooms. Their bunks lining walls and walls and their bedding of plastic sheet: Some, if they are lucky to be small, a tissue shroud. But more than a prison, a tomb.
That is where the sledge, my sledge, lay in state: its Westminster or Royal Naval Hall miles away. I'm sure it has had a few visitors, unlike some of its comrades, and has been written about, short epitaphs in conference papers or distinguished journals. Should we bury our objects just as we bury our bodies? Would our histories suddenly mean more, would we actually learn from our pasts instead of merely discussing them? Those conference paper, those published thesis? I'm not sure. I don't know how things would be different. Museums or garbage dumps: A person's private collection or a private moment within the confines of a storage facility. Searching through 'history' reveals many poignant potshards and scat. And a sledge can become the thing that the entire world rests on, instead of a turtle's back.

Make shift boats and grand entrances

2007-06-13T18:26:00.000Z

Yesterday's excursion to Dulwich college (or 'high school), a 'public' (which is equivalent to private) school in south east London: The 'James Caird'is the little sail boat that Shackleton and five men sailed 800 miles to reach South Georgia Island from Elephant Island (in the Antarctic) where his men were stranded. They then had to traverse South Georgia in order to get to the whaling station that was located on the other side. It was the first time the island's interior was crossed. Shackleton's boat, the 'Endurance' had been crushed in the ice but they had managed to get many provisions off. Shackleton attended school at Dulwich College.

Shackleton managed to rescue every one of his men off Elephant Island. They all lived to tell their tales

One of the members of the crew refitted the sail boat for their 800 mile journey by adding a few inches around the top ridge and fitting cloth to it so that while 3 men tended the sails and such, the other men could get rest below, out of the wind.

Shackleton donning his Sunday best...on Antarctica.

Around the walls of the room were photographs and other memorabilia such as the sledges and sail.

This was the original sail used. It was beautiful in its weathered state

Sledges used during one of his Antarctic trips.

On a different note, this is the souvenir program from the Royal Naval Exhibition in 1891 at Chelsea in London, which had features such as HMS Victory, the ship that Sir Nelson was killed on, a Panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar, an exhibit about Captain Cook, and of course, Sir Franklin and his men.

Even then they had advertisements in their programs, which cost 6 pence.

This was the floor plan: notice that I have marked with a blue dot the entrance of the exhibition. The Red dot signals where the Franklin Relics were on display! The very first exhibit!

In the program, Franklin was Chapter One

Example of the layout with the 'relics'.

The writing is a bit difficult to read since the program was not in very good shape.

Captain Sherard Osborn's masterpiece

2007-06-12T08:26:00.000Z

I thought I would give you a few excerpts from Captain Sherard Osborn's book: Instead of only telling you about it.

The title of the book is, "The Career, Late Voyage, and Fate of Captain Sir John Franklin", which covers his early navy career, a little bit of his early arctic explorations, his stint as Governor in Tasmania, the 1845 arctic expedition, and then the aftermath, with a special section about Lady Franklin, too.

Franklin's first marriage was to Eleanor Porden, who died during one of his earlier arctic expeditions. They had only been married for 2 years and she was quite sick when he left:

"She seemed largely to have partaken of the enterprising spirit of her husband, and when, within two short year (1825), Franklin stood by her side and held in his hand the summons of his country to proceed upon another Arctic Expedition, and with his heart overflowing with sorrow and pride, told her how sad the conflict between love for her and duty to his country and profession, noble Eleanor Porden thought not of self, though she knew the hand of death was already pressing her down to the land of long rest and silence, and that no more in this world would she meet her beloved husband. Forgetting self, she urged him bravely on to the fulfillment of the task his God and country had assigned him; and, with her health and faltering hands, worked a flag which was to spread to the winds, and think of her at the moment when she proudly hoped he would reach the polar sea, that great stop towards the Northwest Passage- the guerdon for which England's naval chivalry then longed, and which this noble woman felt assured her beloved husband must one day win." (p. 25-26)

A classic! The wife, supportive, strong, yet on her deathbed, but ever so steadfast in her faith in her husband.

But he returns and after a few years, Marries again! Osborn makes an excuse for this:

"Three years after the death of his first wife Eleanor, Franklin married Jane Griffin, and it is singular to observe how well Franklin placed his affections upon two women who, each in their sphere of action, stand forth as charming instances of the British matron. Eleanor Franklin dying, knowing that she never more may see the man she loves, urges him on to the execution of his duty, and enables Franklin to lay down, by his discoveries in Arctic America, the foundation upon which he is hereafter to erect his own titled to immortality in this world, - and Jane Franklin... seventeen years subsequently, no only supports her heroic husband…but when,,, the secret of his success was hidden from mortal ken, owing to the self-sacrifice of those martyrs to science, she... steadfastly, earnestly laboured for eleven long years, sacrificing health and patrimony to learn the history of her husband's fate; and in spite of many failures…worked out the great object of her woman's faith and love- That he indeed, John Franklin, had not lived, laboured, or died in vain." (p. 27-28)

I thought I should also add the few sections that Osborn clearly imagined: Franklin's ships were last seen by two whaling ships off the coast of Greenland heading up towards Lancaster Sound (they were in Baffin's Bay). After this sighting, they left no message in any cairn as their their whereabouts, at least none that has been found. Except the Victory Point Record that had two messages: the first an 'all is well' written in 1846, and then an 'all is hell' message written in 1848. This is how we know the exact date of Sir John Franklin's death is from this message. But nothing more about their scientific calculations, etc. :

"...They cannot now advance in that direction, for it is a hopeless block of heavey floes; but Wellington Channal is open, and smiles and sparkles in blue and sunlit waves, as if luring them to the northwest. Why not try a north-about passage round the Parry Islands? Urges Fitzjames. Franklin agrees with him that anything is better than delay, and at any rate they determine to explore is, and ascertain whither it led." (p. 46-47)

Later on in Osborn's retelling, he comes to the part where Franklin has died, the men are at a loss because the ships are iced in:

"oh! Mourn him not, seaman and brother Englishmen! Unless ye can point to a more honourable end or a nobler grave. Like another Moses, he fell when his work was accomplished, with the long object of his life in view. Franklin, the discovered of the North-west Passage, had his Pisgah, and so long as his countrymen shall hold dear disinterested devotion and gallant perseverance in a good cause, so long shall they point to the career and fate of this gallant sailor" (p. 73).

And then the crewmembers abandon the ships and take to land, King William Island, pulling two huge sailboats (their makeshift sledges) behind them full of miscellanious things. And as Osborn repeatedly tells us, enough for forty days but that is all. Fitzjames is Commander Fitzjames of the 'Erebus', who strangely enough is elevated to 'Captain' by the Royal Navy while he is stuck (or rather dead) in the arctic:

"...and he (Fitzjames) strive hard, by kind and cheering words, to impart new courage to many a drooping heart…. They must quit the ships or die; and, if they must die, is it not better that they should do so making a last gallant struggle for life? – at any rate, they can leave their bleaching skeletons as a monument upon Cape Herschel, of having successfully done their duty." (p 76)

The next section of the book is loosely devotes to Lady Franklin and then to the various search parties and their expertise but he ends this previous chapter on these words:

"We will now briefly relate how a woman's devote loved, and a generous nation's sympathy, at last cleared up the mystery which once hung over the voyage…and secured to Franklin and his followers the honour for which they died- that of being the First Discoverers of the North-West Passage." (p 85)

This basically sealed the deal: Franklin was the 'discoverer' of the passage, which made him an icon.

Osborn ends on these final words, as many of the account I've read do:

"As those men fell in their last sad struggle to reach home, their prayer must have been that their country men might learn how nobly their accomplished the task they had voluntarily undertaken. That prayer has been granted. As long as Britain exists, or our language is spoken, so long will it be remembered and related the glorious fate of the crews of the Erebus and Terror, and how nobly they died in the execution of their duty to their Queen and country". (p 111)

............................
On a different note, a question was asked of me last night about what happened to the ships after they went into the arctic? Good question! Many of the ships that were part of the Franklin search & rescue parties were used over and over again, recycled. The two ships Franklin had used, the 'Erebus' and 'Terror' were also the ones that had gone with John Ross to the Antarctic! These two Franklin ships have never been found of course. But most ships passed through multiple hands and were refitted depending on what type of voyage it was taking- trade ship, arctic expedition ship, etc.. Like our airplanes: just because they take one voyage doesn't put them into retirement. I don't know a lot on this subject so can't give you too much more information. But I will look into it-

Contest: guess what is happening in this illustration

2007-06-11T22:40:00.000Z

Today at the N.M.Museum library I didn't get back to the book I had been reading on Saturday but I will get back to it on Wednesday. I still leave you with the confusing illustration: So here begins the contest!
If you wish to play, relook at the last drawing (from Saturday's post) and offer your guess as to what is occurring. So far my sister is winning. 'Post' your story on the message board.

This illustration precisely sets the stage for the reading I did today. Flowery language about the scary arctic, and Franklin as its humble victim. The book was titled 'Arctic Regions' and gave accounts of many arctic expeditions though
Franklin's was the highlight. Also a nice section about the wildlife at the back.

At the back was an advertisement! for canned potatoes! And with a three pages of personal anecdotes about how wonderful the potatoes are to eat. Even Captain Inglefield gives his opinion!

Map from A.G. Findlay's pamphlet on Franklin's probable route. It wasn't too exciting but the map was great!

King William 'Land' which is actually an island. The place where the Franklin men abandoned ship

Today I read through the account Professor Lambert had referenced to me written by Sherard Osborn, one of the many Captains during this time in 1857. The book is completely hilarious because at one point, Osborn goes into his own version of what happened on Franklin's ships during those two years, complete with dialogue and I emotions. The brilliance of it, in terms of creating a soap opera for the public! It is full of melodrama and triumphant phrases, and also the book that clinched Franklin into the fictionalized fame of 'discoverer of the Northwest Passage'. The next few drawings are from the book.

A drawing depicting the first time Franklin saw and fell in love with the sea! (Osborn's book)

Sir John Franklin's Funeral or what it was imagined to have looked like! (Osborn's book)

The two ships presumably near Cape Felix. (fictional drawing from Osborn's book)

I left the N.M.M. library a bit early today in order to jet over to the Royal Naval Chapel before it closed. The chapel was first built in 1752, burnt down and then rebuilt in 1779-1789 by James Stewert, an architect/designer.

Panel outside the chapel alluding to Franklin...need to get more information about what this is about...a donation made in his name perhaps?

Motifs along the balcony railings

Franklin Memorial, hidden in the Royal Navy Chapel behind the apse that was built later on.

It is actually a tomb, where bones of a supposed officer is buried. Two crewmembers came back to England. The one identified by name is John Irving who is buried outside of London. And then this fellow.

The National Maritime Museum CAIRD library

2007-06-09T23:22:00.000Z

Where I've been spending my London days. Alas, it is not an art gallery nor a designer clothing boutique but one could fathom to say that it includes both, to varying degrees.

My desk by the window, looking out onto the vast entrance of the museum compound. Too bad you can't see all the tourists walking about on a Saturday afternoon.

A beautiful cover example of a Franklin book published in the 1850's.

And I leave you with this fabulously confusing image: To be continued...

Magneticisms of the 1800's

2007-06-09T22:13:00.000Z

First, I would like to make a correction to one of the captions to my photographs from Wednesday: the image of the ship tilting and the man who seems to be holding a line that is connected to the ship- It is the 'Isabel' not the 'Sophia'. Apologies, please.

As to not having posted yesterday, I don't really want to go back so I will briefly tell about the various information I was reading. After being at the Royal Geographic Society all day (on Thursday), I now have a soft spot in my heart for the National Maritime Museum CAIRD library. As it isn't anything bad or dramatic, I don't need to go into it.
I read through the 'Report of the COmmiitee appointedy by the Lords Commission of the Admiralty to enquire into the Causes of the Outbreak of Scurvey in Recent Arctic Expeditions'. Phew! quite the title! And it was quite the document! With questioning/testimonies of many officers, medical doctors, and Captain Nares, whose ships were in question, the 'Discovery' and the 'Alert'. Now Captain Nares's expedition is also the one whose photographs are currently part of the 'Freeze Frame' exhibition at the N. Maritime Museum. The document was complete with scientific tests done on the food rations that came back from their expedition, logs of how many days the various sledge teams were out in the field compared to the number of days they were on the ship, how much they were carrying, how much they were eating (or not eating), etc. It was a lengthy read and I became quite done with it after a while. The expedition had the most cases of scurvy than any other thus far in the 1800's, yet the expedition's dates were 1875-1876! So late in the game!
It was the first time I had come across a list of medicines and tinctures they brought with them and the personal items such as bedding, shoes, for the crewmembers.
Interestingly, there is a comparison in this report of 'Dietary of Convicts at hard labour compared with the dietaries of the sailors on board ship, and of those belonging to the sledging party' by a Dr. Guy (p. 369). According to the chart, the convicts ate more (and better) and drank more than the sailors had during their arctic expedition.

After this I moved onto 'Arctic Expedition. Further Correspondence and Proceedings connected with the Arctic Expedition' from 1852 which was both houses of parliament's record of all documents/letters/conversations they had. Again, a lengthy reading. But it was completely fascinating in that it gave provision lists for various expeditions. It also had Captain Austin's suggestions for new provisions, as I had mentioned in Wednesday's post, and the reasons behind those new requests. Such as moccasins as opposed to the leather boots they were wearing. Another list was of the items found in Aug. 26 & 27, 1850 on Beechy Island by 'Lady Franklin' and 'Sophia' crewmembers.

I left the R.G. Society feeling a bit daunted by the massive amount of information I still need to find, read, get through, perhaps digest and try to match up/make sense of. I wandered around for a bit, which didn't help, and then ended up coming back to the house and drinking a bit of wine, still quite unable to digest the concept of piles and piles of information. This, though, is one of the key reasons I am interested in the Franklin story. The massive amounts of attention Sir John and his crewmembers received and still do: The public outpouring in the mid 1800's that continues and how fact and fictions often blur and all become part of a historical 'event'. This is the brilliant aspect of 'history': it can bend and shift, over many decades and centuries until is turns into something else, something quite different. After learning 'art history' in college and then being part of that which now teachest it, (as a grad student to incoming freshman students last year), there are those things one learns and relearns at a later date only to find that everything has changed! everything has morphed! It is a theme that is so apparent in 'art history': there are 'women artists' and 'African American artists' and then there are the 'artists'. Not really. They are all 'artists', who just happen to be biologically a little different.

As I find more information from documents, I learn that what I have read from more current books have certain twists. Some say Sir John Franklin was not a very good Captain. Some say he was. Each takes its own angle, which becomes very confusing when one is trying to be earnest in their 'fact-finding-mission'. I laugh because I, too, fell into my own trap! This brings me to today's 'Freeze Frame Lecture' at the Museum. The two guest lecturers were Professor Andres Lambert from King's College speaking about how the real driving force behind Franklin's expedition was to record magnetic variations around the arctic, particularly around the magnetic pole, and Professor Klaus Dodds from University of London discussing the history of Antarctica's land claiming fate from 1908- 1959. Both very accessable and incredible lectures.

But I am going to concentrate on Professor Lambert's lecture which clarified for me how prevalent and focused the arctic expeditions really were during this time in relationship to what was going on in the rest of Europe in terms of scientific 'firsts' and scientific data/documentation/measuring. As I had hoped and presumed, there was more to this 'Northwest Passage' travail than just ego: there was scientific data to be collected, and in vast importance to the rest of western Europe in viewing the British. It wasn't just for 'Empire', it was also for 'Science', or at least while Banks was in charge (of the Royal Society). The importance of collecting mainly the magnetic measurements of such a place as the Arctic because of the magnetic North Pole, was deemed valuable not just in 'science' but in the Navy's navigational aptitude as well. In finding these measurements, the British would be able to not just have a survey of this area but be able to adeptly navigate through any type of land just by understanding how the 'magnetic pole' influences movement: 'the development of a general theory of terrestiral magnetism' as quoted by Professor Lambert, which he compared in importance to our modern day navigationing system, GPS.

Now, in thinking about what the public was like back then and in relationship to the publishing of scientific data, which would entail dauntingly dense numbers and calculations, it should be rather evident that the regular british citizen preferred the dramatic, frostbitten, tantalizing sagas that were played out in the newspapers, books, and published personal accounts. They didn't quite like the cannabalism that was found, but they did covet the role of the grieving widow and her plight to find what happened to her courageous husband.

According to Professor Lambert, when Joseph Banks died, Sir Edward Sabine took over (at the Royal Society) as the driving force behind furthering British scientific research in the arctic. Also, different than what I had read about Sir John Franklin being the last in line of the long list of Captains to be chosen, that he supposedly was the 'last pick of the litter', Lambert argued that this was not true, although he wasn't the immediate choice: Sir John Ross was, just like I had read. But: Sir John Franklin, more because of his age than his lack of expertise was at first passed over. It was because of his supreme expertise in both navigation AND magnetic science that he was finally chosen, even despite his age. He had already been on 3 previous arctic expeditions, by land and ship. He was the only man for the job, sort of to say.
Professor Lambert also claims that of course Franklin headed towards the magnetic pole, because his main intention was to collect magnetic data around that area, which could not be taken one time but rather in multiple areas. He also argued that that was why there were 14 officers on board, a quite high amount, and so many seamen. They were there to aid in the taking of scientific data collection/research. The timing of Franklin's trip was calculated so as to link up with all the other magnetic data collecting that was occuring at stations all over the world: It wasn't happenstance that the voyage left when it did.
One question (though there are many), is why didn't the search parties then go immediately to these places in the Arctic, given that that was where Franklin was intending to go? Why did it take them so long to travel down towards King William Island and instead they went into Melville Sound and other such places?

I have other questions as well: why didn't the Admiralty and other Captains further push for the public to understand the importance of such scientific discoveries? As a contemporary example, the public display of research done in space, and especially the broadcast of the Apollo moon landing: why was the British Royal Society/Admiralty not as forceful in a public display of how important this actually was in the bigger, world view at that time? The public and writers, even Charles Dickens in his 'Household Words' weekly journal, grasped onto this romanticized speculation about what occurred to the Franklin expedition and why and how and when. The Admiralty didn't end it, didn't give the grieving families the crewmembers 'death money' or certificates but rather let it play out? Was this because it was a time of peace? But then the Crimean war occurred and the Navy (and finances) were needed again. Was it then that the Admiralty signed the death certificates? I need to dig more and see if these dates/things collide.

My interests lay in how the visual melodrama was played out for the public, how through visual evidence (mostly imaginary drawings done by the illustrators who they themselves had not traveled into the Arctic), the 'Arctic Unknown' was first created and through this, it was able to be then 'discovered' by these public 'heroic' polar Captains: that is was a fantastic publicity stunt pushed to the edge when you include Lady Jane Franklin as a central figure. The manner of language used in describing the captains, officers, and crewmembers far surpassed a normal image. For example, they published the accrued pages printed in the arctic of the 'Aurora Borealis', newspaper created aboard Captain Austin's ship in 1852. (This is the document I am currently going through.) It was almost mandatory that the public display their reverence towards these men who risked themselves. A disappearance, and then a re-appearance through artifacts, language, and the force of the media.

To make a contemporary comparison, how are we force fed all the same type of visual evidence to assist us in creating the 'correct' view we should have towards Iraq and our soldiers, more so at the beginning of the war than now. Supposedly, America has ventured into Iraq to save its people from the terrible leader, hidden terrorists (now quite unhidden), and from the apparent (but really quite unapparent) WMDs. America is there to prosper the people and give them 'democracy'. In thinking about publicity stunts throughout the centuries, could we just add this to the collection? The resources in that area, especially while trying to feed americans' personal vehicle lust, are far too obvious a choice when creating a bigger picture of what is really going on. To admit, I realize that I have over-simplified a grave and dark matter. It is only to get worse.
But like all governments who indeed acknowledge their first class power, America is no different, especially in the history of empires (and dictators).
It is rather frightening. 'Iraq' is an 'unknown': is 'it', whatever 'it' is today, to be feared? I have never been there and I don't think I closely know anyone who has. But thankfully, in a place like America, if you truly want to know something and find out what something is like, the internet is just a public library stop away. Blogs, soldiers' digital cameras, personal account websites and public posts, and emails have not only placed personal experience above a government stated address but it has at times undermined what the government is (trying) to proclaim.

Phew!
All this from a little research grant funded through a huge university, which is probably assisting in the war in some way. Many departments do get funding through the government since it is the bigger company always willing to give money for un/masked war research. Franklin's expedition was one of the finest funded trips thus far as of 1845. His provisions were in excess, his scientific instruments none too weak or sparse. His crew definitely were in the numbers. And two ships, to say the least. Yes, this expedition was not to fail in all that it endeavored. Yet, it did. And it left no written message as to why. It has taken countless writers, passing time, and a plethora of falsehoods to create the portrait that we, as a public, know, that yes, Franklin was triumphant, his widow grievous, and his crewmembers valiant in their disappearance: The triumph in failing! Even with the cannabalism.

Scandals, explosives, and the evolution of provisions

2007-06-07T20:30:00.000Z

Previously in a post, I mentioned a letter written by 'ALMAN' who seemed in a tizzy about John Barrow's actions, which was addressed to him. Well, it seems like there was quite the scandal brewing and stewing between Barrow and various other Captains and officers that Sir Barrow pushed to the top echelon. It is a complicated story to retell: after John Ross's NorthWest Passage Expedition in 1818, Barrow and a few others claimed 'favorites' and these did not include Ross or some of the other 'best and brightest' but rather those officers who had significant sums of money and family noteriety. Such is the case, even today. Poor John Ross ended up never leading another mission after his search mission for Franklin, even though he presumably had served on 36 ships and had made many inventions such as the Royal William sextant. Alas, because of his familial background, in the end they wouldn't let him 'pass', even with so many accomplishments. This is quite interesting because Sir John Barrow came from more humbler background, too, and rose up through the ranks.
Ross was not on Barrow's side and it was reported (though I haven't yet read) that in Barrow's memoir in 1846 about his committment to Arctic exploration, he slandered Ross quite a few times. It was Barrow, Parry, Sabine, and James Ross (nephew to John Ross) vs. John Ross and Scoresby (inventer of such things as 'marine diver' that measured deep sea temperatures and who was more scientifically trained than anyone else). So it seems that 'ALMAN' might have been exasperated for good reason.

I came across a list of the scientific instruments that Edward Sabine (who was later to become president of the Royal Society) was to use during John Ross's 1818 expedition. Sabine's role was the 'supernumerary' on board the expedition and was supposed to know how to use:
magnetic needles, barometers, termometers, specific gravity instruments, Wallaston's macrometers, eletrometers, chronometers, pendulum clocks, artificial horizon, instruments used to obtain samples from the ocean floor (John Ross had invented the 'Deep Sea Clam'), and an apparatus for measuring the air in the water.
Sabine had only trained on scientific measurements for two months before serving this particular function onboard the expedition.

A letter that was published by the I.L. News by Mr. G. Shephard in 1849 recounted his experience in observing explosives being used on the Danube to blow up the ice and create 'roads' in the water. "A mere shell was exploded under the ice, which was nearly four feet in thickness. The effect it produced was terrific; large masses of ice were forced in all directions, or, in other words, rendered the space where the explosion had taken place completely navigable" (Oct. 6 1849, p 250). Incredibly, when I was then reading through the 1852 I.L. News, I came across an article about the first huge Franklin search mission by Captain Belcher and it references that they would be using explosives! I was shocked and so excited that I had found a link in texts between years! Fantastic!
The explosives were attributed to a 'Mr. Hay, lecturer on chemistry at Portsmouth Dockyard' though instead of Shepherd. But Shepherd was later mentioned in the article as having designed message balloons that the expedition would use: "The balloons are made on this occasion to float on the water, should they come down at sea. The messages are to be printed on satin of various colours, and on papers of all colours; and about 500,000 of them will be printed on both sides, leaving room to fill in in writing the latitude and longitude of the vessels at the time they are sent up" (April 17, 1852, p. 305). I have attached a photo of the 'message engraving' in the photos below.

As I still like to believe in Nelly, the LockNess sea creature (not a monster!), I read that on March 13, 1852 a sea serpent was killed by Charles Seabury and his ship the 'Monogahela' in Lat. 3degree 10' S & 131degree 50' W on January 13, 1852. The sea serpent measure a whopping 103 feet 7in long and 49ft 4in at its thickest. It had a tongue that was like a heart at its end and was reported to be male.

I wish I could write more about my findings from yesterday but I must move on: Today I woke and reorganized a bit to see exactly what I had found and what pieces I am missing and probably don't know that I am missing. Finally hearing back from the handler of the artifact collection from the National Maritime Museum who will give me access to the Franklin artifacts, I will go there sometime next week. This is good because I have gotten so swept up with visuals from the newspaper that I must get back to actual objects! Tangible in the hand, holding! or probably just 'looking' as some of the artifacts are brittle, like the bible and the books of church songs.

My intention today was to go past the Royal Geographic Society and see where it is and what it is like. You can still become a member of this Society, though I am not sure how much it is. (www.rgs.org) I ended up ensconced in their library, with only 2 hours before it closed! And there is a vast treasure trove of reports to parliament there that states requests that the various lieutenants, captains, and commanders made for more or new provisions. After 'testing' various equipment in the arctic, they did indeed evolve! and change their way of doing things. Though it still was not as evolved as the Inuit populations. One quite brilliant suggestion given by a John Christophers was of a new mode of traveling on the arctic land: placing long willow poles with 'a red bunting' on the end and a parchment notice in the ground every mile. The men instead of all going at once in a crew, would leave from the ship in sledge teams of 12 each day, as to 'refresh' the previous batch who left the day before should some of them not be well. I don't know if the British adopted this during the 1800's, at least I have not read any reports that they did. It seems so 'modern', and actually was sort of like a technique used by Scott in Antarctica: he left markers and provisions every 100 (?) or about that far as he went so that on his return trip, just in case, his team would have supplies and he would know how far away from base camp he was. Unfortunately, when he and his remaining 3 team members died in the freak blizzard, he was only about 180 miles from his last provisions marker.

Tomorrow I am going back to the Royal Geographic Society and have 5 documents waiting for me.

oh, one last piece of information: the day before Belcher and Pullen's ships sailed, they were regularly inspected: " During the day, Captain Washington, R.N., visited the whole of the vessels of the squadron, having brought down a box for the commanding officers of each. The contents of the boxes were six dozen of dolls, dressed by the ladies of Woolwich, and intended as presents for the Esquimaux. Mr. and Mrs. Keane have, with great liberality and kindness, sent to the Arctic ships a quantity of theatrical dresses for the use of the theatre, which has always produced such a fertile and successful source of amusement in previous expeditions" (April 24, 1852, p. 321). I will tell you more about these 'theatrical performances' created by the crew members! Let's just say, there were no women onboard, but there were women's characters written in the scripts! One must take responsibility for their own Entertainment, my friends!

Illustrated London News images 1845 and 1852

2007-06-07T20:01:00.000Z

Article on the great fire in Pittsburgh that swept through in 1845 that burned down almost the entire downtown area. I grew up in Pittsburgh so it was funny coming across this article!

A drawing of 'icebergs' along with an interesting description of them.

The Captain himself, Sir John Franklin...

...and his ships, the 'Erebus' and 'Terror'. Poor 'Barretto Jr.' is not shown here, who was the vessel that was their supply ship while traveling across the Atlantic to Greenland.

The distinguished Captains and Lieutenants who were part of the 1852 search and rescue missions, the first officially sent out by the Admiralty, including (L to R) Osborne, Allard, M'Clintock (my favorite), Pullen, and Richards. This drawing was originally a photograph taken by Mr. Beard's photographic studio. !

The tilting of the 'Sophia' as she is hoisted up by the ice floe.

Drawing done by an Esquimaux who said that he had seen two ships stranded on an iceberg. These ships were said to be Franklin's two ships as more reports from a whaling vessel the 'Renovation' also reported seeing two apparently abandoned ships.

Drawings of two Esquimaux women in festive dress during Captain Belcher's Expedition

The text from the new balloon messages that were to be used by Captain Belcher. Each satin balloon would possess an engraved tag with this text offering up the specified information. The balloons were supposedly able to float in the water if they lost their air.

Bellott Memorial: the first memorial I have documented, located on the sight of the old Royal Navy Academy

Out and About

2007-06-07T11:20:00.001Z

I will be writing tonight about yesterday and today's voyage. I am about to do a little geographical exploration in London: Westminster Abby, Royal Geographical Society, British Museum, Natural History Museum. Quick stops but I will probably have to make return visits.
Alas, unfortunately I could not find the article about the Voracious Codfish from Tuesday's post in the London Illustrated News. For some reason they must have forgotten to put it in...

Illustrated London News

2007-06-05T21:31:00.000Z

The scene of today's mystery

Cover of newspaper

An Arctic scene: preparing for winter

Building an ice house

I'm not sure what these men are doing

Franklin name...found!

Someone else was here before me!

Oh, and there are volcanoes too!

2007-06-05T19:59:00.000Z

My search this morning began with a long bus ride and then a vortex of little sea children all holding hands swarming into the museum. And then another wave crashing in with slightly older children in blue uniforms. Each time I go to the museum, even though I am going into the library and that the museum is free, it is required that I get a ticket at the desk. I will have collected a plethora of tickets, each marked with a new date for my visual diary.

I began with a rare book that I had ordered up from the deep dark stacks of the museum. It was a letter to John Barrow, Secretary of the Admiralty (who really was the main man) from someone named 'ALMAN' about what he called 'the Extraordinary and Unusual Hyperborian Discoveries' that Captain Parry made in 1826. I couldn't quite figure out what ALMAN'S argument (and disgruntled nature) was all about, though I think he was trying to voice his unhappy dismay over something J. Barrow had said or claimed about the arctic and Parry's voyage. He ends with stating that more important than a mere trade route, going to the North Pole and losing so many men to its 'discovery' is worth it if, in the name of science and scientific research, it is found and documented, especially with a British flag firmly planted into the cold ground. I am finding that this theme of 'FOR SCIENCE!' was more common than I had first thought. Or perhaps it was equal to that of 'trade and commerce' and 'conquering the land'.

The Illustrated London News was my key source for entertainment today: years 1845 & 1849. This newspaper came out weekly and was chalk full of drawings (hence 'illustrated'), or rather prints. Many of the headlines were as funny as much of today's newspapers are: Clairvoyance, Sea Serpent Seen, Icebergs (complete with lovely diagrams), and the Extraordinary Voracity of Codfish! I haven't read yet the Codfish headline because I didn't get time today. But I promise to tell you about it tomorrow or Thursday. My intention for looking through this newspaper was to find how this newspaper depicted the artic for the general public, textually and visually in its illustrations. I certainly was not let down. I came across THE article, that I had read about in my other more current Franklin books, about the first ship lead by british Captain Kellett, who happened to be floating off of San Francisco, going up into the Berring Strait to see if Franklin was there. Of course, Franklin was not there and the article published this sad announcement. But I had found it! My first physical thing! That smelled like a tired page that had been stuck too snugly next to other books, though it had a more recent blue cover binding. The pages and pages of paper with imprints, almost like a bully typewriter pushing and shoving each poor letter into the yellow, thin paper so that it learns its lesson.

Old Captain Ross, who lead one of the first search and rescue missions, also had a full spread about this trip, complete with fabulous illustrations, which I will post above when I am finished here.

Another book I went through today was 'The Polar World: a description of Man and Nature in the Arctic and Antarctic regions of the globe written by G. Hartwig in 1869. This book was intended for the public reader as he claims in his preface. You might know him from his 'other' books such as 'The Sea and its Living Wonders' or 'The Harmonies of Nature'.... The book meanders through the various geographical levels of the Arctic so I skipped to the chapter he devotes to the Inuit as I wanted to see what kind of wording he used to describe them. Surprisingly! He seemed quite fond of the Inuit and painted a positive, almost honorable, for the time, portrait of them. Hartwig says, "The weapons of the Esquimaux, and their various fishing and hunting implements, likewise show great ingenuity and skill", though he then negates this by saying, "In intelligence and susceptibility of civilization the Esqimaux are far superior to the neighboring Indian' (334). Too bad he couldn't just stick with his flow. Overall, I was surprised that he proclaimed some of these things given that the British refused to adopt any of the 'ingenius' survival tactics that the 'Esqimaux' had invented.

So this brings me to the 'volcano' that I have dedicated today's post title to: The volcano of the North (and South!) Poles! In the 1770's, Hon. Daines Barrington, who as I read yesterday was quite the crazy eccentric and happened to be a judge, kept rallying behind the British to send forth more exploratory missions to the North. Around 1780, the British finally relented and offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could reach the North Pole. Quite a bit of money. Reading in "Polar Portraits: Collected Papers" by A.G.E. Jones in the article 'High Arctic Altitude', a Mr James Wyatt, who happened to be up above Scandanavia near Spitzbergen sailing around (perhaps whaling) claims to have gone almost all the way to the North Pole! His letter, published in the Ipswich Journey on August 1786, gives this account of his great discovery!:

"...But to my great surprise in latitude 87 degree N. we found no ice. I therefore determined to go to the North Pole, well knowing that the discovery of a passage of that importance, if successful, would more than indemnify me for the voyage, and as the ship was my own i could therefore stand the loss. In latitude 89 degree N. we were alarmed with a rumbling noise like thunder at a distance...but we still kept our course... and the noise increased the further North we got; when the noise became excessively loud, we discovered something like an ice hill about 3 leagues off; the sailors called out land...We ascended the hill which was some height; but what was my astonishment when i reached its summit, to behold...the elements at war: something issuing out to the northward quite white, and flying upwards with prodigious force.
The few crystalline substance like glass fell near me, which were hexagonal and reflected the light. Upon tasting it I found it was nitre; I collected some and put them into a cut glass smelling bottle, and for sometime after they continued to shine in the dark: by this I shall endeavor to account for the Aurora Borealis. The particle emitting light I own suprised me a little, altho' I new that some diamonds have the property of imbibing the sunds rays and shining in the dark. I had not been so long at the top of the hill before a most dreadful eruption issued forth, which proved to me there was a volcano that threw out nitre at the North Pole....
There is, no doubt, a similiar volcano of nitre at the South Pole..." (p. 8-9)

Ah, yes, he ends by requesting that the Parliament award him his reward money for passing so very high in latitude. Alas, I know from reading yesterday that they did not give him any money, asserting that his story was false. BUT! They wronged him! There DOES happen to be a volcano, not at the North Pole but rather at the South Pole called Mount Erebus. Poor gent, if he had waited another 100 years, he could have known this.

Royal Observatory

2007-06-04T20:29:00.001Z

Looking up towards the Royal Observatory, the Keeper of Exactitude, from in back of the N. M. Museum.

Better make sure your watch it correct! The exact time!

Again, British precision!

Looking out from outside the entrance to the buildings, which were closed by the time I came out of the library.

'REVELATION: A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM'

2007-06-04T18:47:00.000Z

Today while at the N.M.M.'s CAIRD Library, I read about the 'true secret' of the discovery of Sir John Franklin's fate as told by a J. Henry Skewer, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Liverpool and the late President of The Liverpool Mental Science Association. Alas! Franklin's fate was not discovered by search and search parties but by a child! A holy child who had a great and quite mystical 'revelation'!

As Skewer describes 'revelation' in Chapter 4 being that of a Captain Coppin's young daughter (perhaps age 6?) who sees her dead sister (who recently died) constantly as a blue glowing light. One day, during the time that Franklin and his crew were missing (around 1852) an Aunt asked the young daughter to question the dead sister (in blue apparition form, named 'Weesy') about the whereabouts of Franklin and his crew, and how he could be reached. So the young daughter did, and the blue apparition, which had never been seen by any of the adults, save once by the father Captain Coppin, disappeared. But immediately appearing on the floor was 'a complete Arctic scene, showing two ships, surrounded with ice and almost covered with snow, including a channel that led to the ships' (p74). The young daughter then drew 'in the form of a chart and with much taste' the scene (p.75). AND THEN! appearing on the opposite wall 'in large round hand letters, about three inches in length the following- Erebus and Terror. Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, Victoria Channel' (p75). Erebus and Terror were the two ships taken by the Franklin crew. As yet, these place names in the latter message had not existed, particularly the reference to a 'Channel'.
So the Captain wrote down the incident as told from his young daughter and took the map she had carefully (and 'skillfully') had copied from the apparition on the floor. The Captain waited 6 months before telling Lady Jane Franklin (who he did not personally know) because he worried that she wouldn't believe him. The 'Revelation!' was finally told to Lady Franklin by the Captain as she was preparing for her first funded expedition the 'Aberdeen'. Upon hearing his story, "she exclaimed 'It is all true! It is all true! Your children are right" (p79).
Since it was a quite 'delicate' matter and all, the 'supernatural' occurrence, it was handled at a personal level, not in the public attention, until Skewer, a Vicar, writes his book in 1889 and Captain Coppin, the father, writes his book.
Skewer seems to bend his book towards an overarching religious purpose and states that the event was a 'subjective revelation' and goes into detail differences within revelations and the supernatual ones. Not that I find the religious theme boring or bad: it is quite interesting, in thinking that children can speak and see more than adults, especially in 'sensitive impressions and perceptions' (p 83). Yet I become a little skeptical when the Vicar repeatedly goes off about how 'human genius has failed to throw light on the Unknown' but that instead now a supernatural appears in Londonderry, England by a child and this is what finally informs the nations of England and the United States on how to find Franklin's dead crew?
Virgin Marys on tortillas, on toast, on screens, in oil slicks, in clouds, and shadows, in leaves. We so very much want to believe, in more than what our numb senses can smell, taste, hear, feel. We want our imaginations to rule out the presumed 'facts' before us. But it is more than our imaginations telling us to believe our personal fictions, our personal stories.

In addition to this juicy story, I came across an exhibion catalog from a show done by the Canadian National Archive of early arctic photographs, which offered me many names of the photographers onboard the ships from about 1865-1911. And another story of very early arctic exploration in 1536 when a Mr. Hore was sent out by King Henry 8 in two ships, the Trinities and the Minion, with a crew of 120 men with 30 of them 'gentlemen' (you can only imagine). The crew got stuck off the coast of Newfoundland and resorted to cannabalism. By chance, a French ship came past and so the British crew seized hold of it, kicking the French off, and taking the ship back to England. It is said that this left a 'disgrace' upon England.

Another interesting word choice I came across today as I read 19th century accounts was 'needful comforts' in discussing the provisions the explorers took along. It makes me think how I used to love eating 'Astronaut ice cream', that freeze dried delicious treat sold at all science museums, especially in the 1980's, and if you were lucky, at your local 'Natural Wonders' shop in the mall. When it first was 'invented', did the Neil, Buzz, and Michael think, 'Wow! We are going to be eating in class now!'.

In a more sobering book, I read W. Parker Snow's oratory he gave in 1860 to the Geographical & Ethnographical Section of the Royal Navy in a plee for them to send out another search & rescue mission, claiming that a few of Franklin's men must still be alive. More importantly, for scientific purposes, they must strive their very best to find all the scientific documentation the expedition must have kept and placed at cairn points in the arctic as was the custom since this had been Sir John Franklin's original directions as well as the N.W. passage. He, a mere lowly merchant marine, was given 30 minutes to present to President Murchison and various other 'Ladies and Gentlemen' including a long list of explorer captains such as Dr. Rae and M'Clintock. The oration won him the Franklin Poem Prize. Later in book form, Snow wrote an introduction along with supplements, etc. In the introduction though, he insightfully quotes an anonymous Australian author:

"It is the inspiration of enthusiasm that has transmitted the electric spark which has blown monster abuses to the
winds. Men may do wise and useful things slowly and calmly enough; but man has rarely done a great thing till he
has gone half mad upon the subject: talked of it, brooded over it, dreamed of it. A sort of actual
inspiration them assists him, and he achieves results at which, in his lucid intervals, he is himself astonished."

The admiratly sent out more expeditions.

mistake

2007-06-03T21:01:00.000Z

My apologies, after rereading my writing just now, I mistyped/misinformed you! Shackleton brought his car to the Antarctica! Not the arctic! ...But his ship is now in London and I am visiting it with Dominique later this week! I will post photos.

Royal Navy Academy

2007-06-03T17:39:00.000Z

Originally housed the Royal Hospital for Seaman: began being built in 1696. Later used in 1873 for training of the navy officers. Now is a museum.