Ilana Halperin: Felt Events

To celebrate her thirtieth birthday in 2003, the American artist Ilana Halperin (b.1973) travelled from her adoptive home of Glasgow to Heimaey, a tiny island off the southern coast of Iceland, to commune with a volcano. Eldfell was formed in the year of the artist’s birth as a result of a series of tremors that, wholly unexpectedly, opened up a lava-spewing fissure several miles long on the eastern flank of the island. Included in Felt Events – a set of academic and creative critical essays, writings by the artist and colour plates – is the transcript of an invitation sent by Halperin to friends, encouraging them to join her on Heimaey for ‘THE ELDFELL BIRTHDAY EVENT’: ‘You may be asking yourself if I am serious about this invite and the answer is absolutely yes, as let’s face it, you and a landmass only turn 30 at (almost) exactly the same time once!’ (p.161).

This extract is part of one of six diaristic, fragmentary essays – often conceived by the artist as ‘performance lectures’ – that make up the third section of the book under review. Part 1 comprises art-historical readings of Halperin’s work, including contributions by the writer and art historian Andrew Patrizio and the curator Naoko Mabon, and the second compiles responses to her 2019 exhibition Minerals of New York at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, by Dominic Paterson, Lisa Le Feuvre and Nicola White. It is clear that Halperin’s visit to Eldfell served as a talismanic event within her creative biography; she is an artist who continuously evokes intimate encounters between human life and geological forms. As Catriona McAra notes in her introduction, such evocations have taken Halperin from a ‘background in stone carving’ towards a practice encompassing, among other things, ‘writing, spoken word, graphite drawings, watercolours, photography, analogue film, sound recordings, printmaking, experimental sculptures and found objects’ (p.9). For example, Halperin’s 2021 exhibition There Is A Volcano Behind My House at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute used an array of media, including textiles, to bring entwined geological, biographical and local historical narratives to life.

Staged in the ornate gothic mansion-turned-art gallery, the show included a series of watercolours on paper, notably Field Studies (2021) and My Conglomerate Family FIG.1. The intricate and richly coloured patterns reference the botany and geology of the island, where Halperin has a small property. Some of the motifs from Field Studies were reworked as fabric hangings and quilts, created on a Jacquard loom or hand-stitched from merino wool, while in the building’s ornate library, polished ‘books’ of mica were displayed, machine-etched with designs evoking microscopic, prehistoric life FIG.2. Most spectacularly, in the crypt beneath the Catholic chapel, she installed Rock Cycle FIG.3, an array of terracotta brick and drainage tiles, fished from the nearby Kilchattan Bay, where they were thrown after the closure of a local clay works in 1915. The pieces were encased in a layer of limestone, which was formed during a three-month stay in the calcium-saturated springs of the Fontaines Pétrifiante de Saint-Nectaire, France.

What is at stake in the affective, conceptually dazzling practice outlined here? To quote Halperin, partly a desire to evoke ‘a more personal response to the idea of geologic time’ (p.74) and, we might add, to something like ‘geological life’. The actions of human beings have precipitated a horrifying quickening of geological time, disrupting processes once impervious to our influence. Halperin cultivates a sensitivity to the ways in which mineral forms and processes sustain animal life and are analogous to and continuous with it. This kind of felt connection is particularly evident in the early work Boiling Milk Solfataras FIG.4, which, as Patrizio notes, is ‘framed [. . .] by the slow transfer of geothermal heat around the sulphur springs of Krafla volcano, north central Iceland’ (p.28).¹ In this photographic print, Halperin boils a small pan of milk using heat from the springs. Here, processes unfolding on vastly different temporal scales – and at vastly different temperatures – to those that sustain human life, are appropriated in a humble, perhaps typologically ‘maternal’ gesture of nurture. Importantly though, that gesture may be directed back towards Earth itself: with no one else present, is Halperin preparing the milk for some form of ritual offering to the springs?

A similar effect is achieved through the silica-encrustation or limestone-encasing of man-made objects at sites where ‘normal geological time’ collapses (p.21). Halperin has sought out these sites throughout her career. For Rock Cycle and The Mineral Body (2013), objects were left on shelves at the Fontaines Pétrifiante, where they were drenched in water so calcium-rich that they quickly filled with, or formed an exoskeleton of, limestone. At the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, a popular tourist resort, wooden stencils based on drawings by the artist were submerged to take on silica shells, as evident in We Form Geology FIG.5. At the iron-rich geothermal springs of Beppu on Kyushu, Japan – an area named ‘Bloody Pond Hell’ for the deep red colour of its waters FIG.6 – chunks of Scottish sandstone and white ceramics were left for twelve months to form the sculptural components of Geologic Intimacy (Yu no Hana) FIG.7. As Mabon notes in a survey of her collaborations with and Halperin, it produced a range of textural finishes: ‘some rusty red, some crystal-like delicate white, some muddy, some crumbly’ (p.53).

By speeding up a process that normally takes centuries or millennia, Halperin invites empathy with non-life by presenting its emergence on a human timescale. Although the artist’s work is never didactic, this in turn might prompt the viewer’s engagement with the man-made catastrophes that define our age, the solutions to which depend on solidarity not just with non-human life but with the non-living elements of our planet. As David Farrier notes in reference to Halperin’s work in his 2019 book Anthropocene Poetics, ‘all life on the planet is here by virtue of a debt owed to the long history in which nonlife shaped the conditions for life to flourish’.² Halperin’s collapsing of geological time, as Patrizio suggests, counteracts both romantic notions of the sublime and the current mood of resignation to the destruction of nature as somehow inevitable: both of which rest on a sense of geological processes as unfathomably vast and aloof to human input.

The naming of rocks as though they were people, as in My Conglomerate Family and Physical Geology (new landmass/map) FIG.8 for example, is a simpler and more playful gesture towards the same ends. But such works also suggest another subtext to the artist’s rendering of intimacy with the geological: we should pay attention to rocks because this might help us to know, or feel, differently and more positively about ourselves and more generously about other human beings. There is a secondary allusion to diasporic identity in Halperin’s evocation of the rock strata that bind together far-flung regions of the planet: ‘Scotland was connected to part of Greenland, was connected to part of Norway, to Appalachia. And actually any territory that you are on has been somewhere else before and travelled. And rocks are really the first immigrants’ (pp.103–04).

We should also not overlook, as Paterson puts it, Halperin’s capacity to present ‘geological events [. . .] as an affective Richter scale [. . .] marking loss or growth or transformation’ (p.116). Minerals of New York, presented in Leeds and Glasgow in 2019, is one of Halperin’s most significant solo exhibitions. It takes as its muse the city where the artist was born and spent her early life, and where sites of geological interest overlap with those of emotional remembrance, intellectual epiphany, pleasure and tragedy. Included in the exhibition was a slideshow of images showing ‘demolition sites and soon-to-be-gone storefronts in mid-1980s Manhattan’ (p.120). The photographs were taken by Halperin’s mother during a period of rampant gentrification in the Upper West Side, where the artist grew up. These are overlaid with a narrative punctuated by the names of stones found at different points around the city. These geographical markers serve as prompts to ruminations on the personal and political:

BLACK TOURMALINE
Found on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue

The other Jewish memorial home in the neighbourhood is located near here. We couldn’t face going back to Riverside Memorial for my father; we’d already been to too many funerals there. If you had a stone for every person you knew who died, it wouldn’t be a cairn or a pile of rocks but a burial chamber tumbling across Broadway (p.196).

Attention to the geological history of the city dislodges or coaxes out other, buried forms of remembrance. Halperin is not an artist for whom geological matters preclude the significance of biography. In this piece and others, the rocky backdrop recedes to afford the socially and politically embedded drama of human life the attention it, too, deserves.