Remarks: Landmass

Ilana Halperin’s ongoing project Towards Heilprin Land explores geological shifts. Halperin presents drawings and photographs from recent field trips to Greenland at doggerfisher, Edinburgh. Her practice is rooted in personal, rather than political, experience and this work is inspired by the chance discovery of American volcanologist Angelo Heilprin, also an artist, possibly a relation. Heilprin Land, a small piece of inaccessible landmass in the north of Greenland, was named after him. She explains,

‘Trace memories of being in such a remote and frozen place feature more prominently within the work at doggerfisher. Towards Heilprin Land is an evolving body of work, so different constellations of material from the project can be drawn from, depending on the context. Each incarnation—from the Sharjah Biennial 8, to the lecture commissioned by Tiffin for the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow—attempts to articulate a specific idea, all related but in slight variations. It’s an ongoing log book.

I’ve been working with the idea of how one might make art within a geological time frame—exploring ways to make corporeal sense of geological phenomena through direct physical contact. I’ve been doing an Alchemy Fellowship at the Manchester Museum, and our first “geological experiment” combines slow time in caves (petrification) to fast time in lava flows. In March I’m doing an exhibition at the museum, of alchemy related work.’