When I Am Laid In Earth: Mapping with a Pyrograph
Exhibition of 3 LensCulture Earth Award Winner: Vienna, March 16 - June 30, 2016
The exhibition “Seen on Earth” will feature the three winners of the Fine Art/Conceptual category from the LensCulture Earth Awards 2015. Simon Norfolk’s award-winning series seen here, along with the work of Mandy Barker and Eduardo Leal, will be shown in an exhibition at the Kunst Haus Wien in Vienna (with prints generously donated by Foto Leutner). Don’t miss the opening party on March 16, 2016!
Below, we share Norfolk’s original artist statement as well as a recently conducted (and exclusive) interview with the artist himself (and a video documentary produced by Norfolk!).
Artist’s Statement
These fire lines indicate where the front of the rapidly disappearing Lewis Glacier was located during various times in the recent past; the years are given in the titles. In the distance, a harvest moon lights the poor, doomed remnant of the glacier; the gap between the fire and the ice represents the relentless melting. Relying on old maps and modern GPS surveys, I have rendered a stratified history of the glacier’s retreat.
It seems entirely appropriate to make these images here. Mount Kenya is the eroded stump of a long-dead, mega-volcano. Photographically, I hope to re-awaken its angry, magma heart. The mountain has an especially fierce demeanor; the peaks are childishly sheer and ragged, and since I first saw them, I’ve been thinking of Gormenghast and Tolkien.
The “Fire vs. Ice” metaphor I employ is especially satisfying. The fire is made from petroleum. My pictures contain no evidence that this glacier’s retreat is due to man-made warming (glaciers can retreat for lack of sufficient snow, or due to thinning cloud cover), but it is nonetheless my belief that humans burning hydrocarbons are substantially to blame.
So, see it now before it’s gone: get over there quick before Mount Kenya is just an unadorned rocky stump, robbed of its innocent, frozen crown. Unless, of course, you feel that flying around the world and injecting tons of hot CO2 into the troposphere in order to witness the melting of Africa’s glaciers is just a little too ironic.
—Simon Norfolk
▻https://www.lensculture.com/articles/simon-norfolk-when-i-am-laid-in-earth-mapping-with-a-pyrograph
#photographie #map #kenya