“The concept of pattern for Ogilvie is immersive not decorative. Sacha Craddock wrote many years ago of the ‘constant relation’ and ‘pattern’ across Ogilvie’s works. In the same catalogue, Kenneth White invoked the great Scottish natural philosopher and scientist D’Arcy Thompson: ‘The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore... so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology’ … The ice blocks used for Out of Ice were painstakingly lit in order to cast intricate shapes on water, reflect them up onto large walls and so bring out the accidents of their melting morphology. Ogilvie’s explorations of ice are like her earlier studies of water in that they have a vital empirical intensity. As she says: “the best way I learn is by direct observation, like most artists, and just living with a material, living with ice seemed to be the ideal situation...”
installation timelapse
Ice Wall | exhibited by the University of Westminster during Vanishing Landmarks (2024)
“The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.”
The following text excerpt is from Out of Ice: The Secret Language of Ice
Andrew Patrizio writes that “Elizabeth Ogilvie’s distinguished career as an artist crystallises in [the ongoing project] Out of Ice. Her subtle entangling of filmmaking, installation, interdisciplinary research and fieldwork—that she calls ‘a kind of choreographic practice’—is a remarkable achievement. What exactly is the nature of its distinctiveness and how might it be read against a wider artistic field? Having now reached an extraordinary level of internal complexity, how might it be used as a tool for thinking deeply about extreme environments? At the very moment when our own planet is itself threatening to become extreme, her work is tangible, accessible and immediate—a welcome art in unwelcoming times.
Ogilvie sets out to inspire. To see how she does this, we must capture her range—from stunning films made on location in Ilulissat on the far west coast of Greenland, to her studio processes, where the playful and the intense are mixed, and to the resolution in grand installations where we read patterns flowing across her screens and filling the atmosphere encircling our bodies. She is exploring environmental art today along one of its most extreme and direct edges, yet perhaps surprisingly, for Ogilvie the far north is not forbidding but is instead a ‘warm and welcoming environment’. She wonders whether her St Kildan ancestry inclines her so, though the obsession is wider and her thirst for knowledge deep. Her research brings her into the company of scientists who study such places and share her feelings of intuitive love, expressed through the careful attention that one needs to begin to understand a complex region like Greenland. The artist and her various collaborators are alive to such places, as they furiously draw in information in order to reach some kind of understanding.
Ogilvie belongs to a lineage of many ‘north-facing’ artists for whom the Arctic offers a chance to awaken into spiritual recognition of an incredible world. This kind of personal awakening becomes the felt experience of a ‘beginner’s mind’, as Buddhist philosophy would put it. It is precisely what one of Ogilvie’s favourite writers, Barry Lopez, was referring to in this beautiful passage in Arctic Dreams:
‘The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression—its weather and colours and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something secret reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.’
Out of Ice contains a lot more of those patterns, as they are inescapably part of the long visual history of polar regions. These patterns are visual of course but they are also implicit and hidden, as the more one studies the Arctic region and Greenland, the clearer one can discern a whole array of narrative structures and patterns that speak of colonialism, romanticism, myth, exploitation, science, beauty and gender. Some of these lie centrally in Ogilvie’s field of vision, others less so. Yet all point to the fact that far from being empty, the Arctic is already teeming with life, with stories, associations and political realities that no artist can step into innocently, snow blind. Ilulissat, like all places above the Arctic Circle, is a place that is born of ice; its behaviours (animal, vegetable or mineral) are enabled by ice. Yet the ice is melting fast and as the landscape and climate start to shift, life and matter is changing accordingly.
Ogilvie sees the resilience and adaptability of the Arctic through the lens of Ilulissat—in other words through a populated town adjacent to some of the most dramatic ice fjords in the world. The Arctic is a place where indigenous and incoming communities both make liveable worlds in and around the ice. Up to now ice has been an enabling actor in the world of Greenlanders. Lill Rastad Bjørst notes that ‘Ice is something you have to pass by or move on to get to the wildlife. Here ice is not an icon or a metaphor...’ Worth noting, then, that long before Ogilvie ever visited Greenland, her work was already ‘nothing to do with a wilderness vision of the earth without man’ and there is no terrible void at the heart of Ogilvie’s work—rather, she has come to know a number of the Inuit inhabitants of Ilulissat personally through her repeated trips there.”
Project Collaborators
In an international collaboration with highly respected anthropologists, scientists and other academics from England, Scotland, Greenland and Denmark, Elizabeth Ogilvie has founded an exchange of social, environmental and cultural knowledge that has informed Out of Ice and many of her other works. Working with her collaborators, Ogilvie hopes to develop a language with the physical materials of ice and water where rationality and intuition together become an agent for socially responsible innovation in the Arctic.
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is a component of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, it has, for over 60 years, undertaken the majority of Britain’s scientific research on and around the Antarctic continent. It now shares that continent with scientists from over thirty countries.
Elizabeth Ogilvie has edited footage shot by BAS of their expedition to Subglacial Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica in 2012 for Out of Ice. In the early hours of 25th December that year, an attempt to explore the lake, deep beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet was called off. The UK project, involving the BAS, the National Oceanography Centre and several Universities, had been in planning for over 10 years. The ambition was to access the lake using a specially-engineered hot-water drill through 3 km of ice and, using the hole created deploy probes to take samples and measurements to look for life in the lake and acquire records of past ice and climate change. Drilling was ceased after the main borehole failed to link with a subsurface cavity of water, built up over ~40 hours. Without this link, insufficient water was available to continue drilling downwards to the lake.
For further information please visit: www.antarctica.ac.uk
Professor Martin Siegert FRSE
Director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre, Prof. of Geosciences, University of Bristol and Hon. Prof. of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Martin Siegert leads the Lake Ellsworth Consortium, a UK-NERC funded programme detailed above. Siegert has undertaken three Antarctic field seasons, using geophysics to measure the sub-glacial landscape and understand what it tells us about past changes in Antarctica and elsewhere.
The University of Westminster is presenting Elizabeth Ogilvie’s Out of Ice in the research-oriented environment of Ambika P3, reflecting its programme of ambitious works, exhibitions and events for a wide range of audiences.
The international conference accompanying Out of Ice – Reading and Exhibiting Nature – is produced in association with the University and co-hosted by the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Fairbanks, for students, artists, environmentalists, anthropologists and climate scientists.
Professor Tim Ingold and Dr Jo Vergunst of the Dept. of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen have a keen interest in the working practice of Elizabeth Ogilvie.
Prof. Tim Ingold is currently Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on the role of animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. More recently, he has explored the links between environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold is currently writing and teaching in relation to the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His latest book, Making, was published in 2013.
Dr Jo Vergunst, Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, whose current research focuses on connections between art practice, anthropology and the environment has been collaborating with Ogilvie since 2008. They have run research seminars together on connections between art, anthropology and the environment. Vergunst is also contributing to the Out of Ice publication.
Assistant Professor Suna Christensen of the Department of Social Anthropology at Metropolitan University, Copenhagen, Denmark has lived, worked and researched in Northern Greenland for over six years. She takes a special interest in the relations between education, livelihood and place. During her PhD research she developed a particular interest in the relation between indigenous Arctic hunters’ livelihood practices, their sense of land and social attention.
In 2010 and 2012, Christensen undertook cross-disciplinary archaeological-anthropological research at a hunting site in West Greenland where the lives of present day caribou hunters sometimes mirror those of pre-historic Inuit hunters. In 2011 she journeyed with hunters across ice landscapes in Northern Greenland to explore the spirit of ice embodied in the hunters’ interrelations with the landscape. Christensen is also contributing to the Out of Ice publication.
Production Team
John Robb, Technical Director
John Robb, technical director of Edinburgh International Festival, is a specialist in engineering environments and has worked closely with Ogilvie during the development of Out of Ice. For 16 years he and his team have been in charge of collaborating with opera and theatre companies and visual arts events facilitating every technical aspect of their productions.
Peter Boott, Technical & Creative Manager, Hawthorns
Peter Boott is working with Ogilvie and Robb to provide technical expertise on Out of Ice. He has a vast experience of providing lighting, AV and semi-permanent and permanent installation services for large-scale events, including sports, TV, theatre and live events and London 2012 Olympics. www.hawthorns.uk.com
Rob Page, filmmaker, editor, Schedule D
Schedule D is an arts-based independent film production company. Page worked with Ogilvie on Bodies of Water at Dundee Contemporary Art and in 2012 accompanied her on a filming expedition to Ilulissat, Greenland.
Astrid Johnston and Tim Bremner, designers
Independent designers Johnston and Bremner are collaborating with Ogilvie on the Out of Ice publication, Out of Ice DVD and publicity materials. www.astandred.co.uk www.bremnerdesign.co.uk
Tom De Majo, sound artist and director
Sound artist and director of the independent games development studio Quartic Llama, De Majo is creating a digital/binary rendering of Ogilvie’s icemelt film and an accompanying sound work. www.quarticllama.com
Sandy Annan, artist
Annan is an artist who has developed methods of working with ice and snow to create unique textures for transfer to plaster and bronze. The resultant sculptures depict the processes of snow and ice melt, and erosion. Annan has assisted Ogilvie in devising ways of handling large blocks of ice, using a combination of research, engineering and artistic skills.
www.sandyannan.com
Janette Scott Arts PR
Independent arts consultant managing the marketing communications for Out of Ice.
Alison Wright PR
Independent PR consultant managing the media campaign for Out of Ice. www.alisonwrightpr.com
Jake Bee, Rob St John and Katie Fowlie, artists
Artists Jake Bee, Rob St John and Katie Fowlie have special experience of introducing green projects to young children and are working with Ogilvie to devise and deliver the Out of Ice education programme.
Out of Ice traveled to Contemporary Art Space Osaka [CASO], Japan in October 2014. A former warehouse, CASO is one of Japan’s largest spaces for contemporary art on the waterfront area of Osaka harbour.
Ogilvie has additionally collaborated on the project with the Universities of Aberdeen, Bristol and Edinburgh in the UK, and Metropolitan University in Denmark. An Out of Ice DVD and publication with essays by Robert MacFarlane is also available.
