Ilana Halperin describes her work as ‘a corporeal exploration of geology’.
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Ilana Halperin describes her work as ‘a corporeal exploration of geology’. Her practice is anchored in an early conversation with a seismologist who told her that tectonic plates move at the same rate as our fingernails grow. Since then, she has been driven by a desire to make deep geological time relatable.
This exhibition begins downstairs with Halperin’s decades-long engagement with Eldfell, an Icelandic volcano born the same year as the artist. Through watercolours, drawings and small sculptures, Halperin explores what it means to think of a volcanic life and a human life in the same timeframe, whilst also understanding that Eldfell’s life will stretch millennia, far beyond her own. Eldfell features in Halperin’s Field Encounters, analogue photographs taken since 1999. Shown here collectively for the first time, they record moments at which the artist meets the natural world and begins to think through how she may make art alongside it.
Halperin’s most recent work The Rock Cycle (from stromatolites to diamonds), shown upstairs, traces a line between ancient microbial lifeforms and the calcium carbonate that is threaded through fossil records, geological formations and life today. This search for life in the geological record has also led Halperin to work together with a scientist and an art historian exploring Mars. The intense watercolours inspired by her virtual field trip to the red planet are shown alongside drawings, texts and stone sculptures that explore connections between Earth, Mars and ourselves. In one of these texts, An Art History of Mars, Halperin reflects, ‘I find myself thinking that privileging our bodies as living and rocks as dead ignores the plain fact that there is a delicate line between what is us and what is Earth.’
New Monograph
This major publication celebrates twenty-five years of work made throughout Halperin’s career. With texts by Paul Bonaventura, Catriona McAra with Claire Cousins, and Stephanie Straine. A sequence of letters between Ilana Halperin, geographer Adam Bobbette and writer Candice Chung offers personal insight into the thought processes behind this intensely beguiling body of work.
Exhibition Guide
‘Geologists say the history of the Earth is like a book, where the pages have been ripped apart and scattered, and their job as geologists is to try and reassemble the story. It is a beautiful way of thinking about our relationship to place.’ Ilana Halperin
Ilana Halperin thinks deeply about our relationship to place, to the rocks that form the foundations of the Earth on which we live. This exhibition brings together several bodies of work made over the last twenty-five years or so that allow us to think about the deep time of geology through the lens of the human life and body.
In the lower gallery Halperin’s Field Encounters (1999–ongoing), large photographic prints of images taken with an analogue camera, record moments of connection and potential between human and place. Her most significant encounter of this kind is through her relationship with Eldfell, a volcano on the island of Heimaey in the Westman Islands of Iceland. This volcano came into being in a violent eruption in 1973, the same year that the artist was born, a serendipity that she discovered in 2003, the year she turned 30. This shared birthday is marked here through several groups of watercolours, as well as rock and mineral samples collected on the slopes of Eldfell. Halperin reflects that thinking about her own lifetime alongside that of a landmass allows her to frame her understanding of deep time. She writes ‘Eldfell will go from a human time scale, 30 years old, 40 years old, to a geological timescale – 150, 1000, 800 million years old.’
Halperin’s ability to contain this long view in her sights, whilst holding onto the intimacy of a human life, is reflected in the drawn map Minerals of New York (2018), shown in the small gallery. This work stemmed from her first encounter with the ‘Subway Garnet’ in the stores of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, ‘perfect, blood red, the size of a grapefruit’, as she described it. Found on 35th Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue in 1885, the garnet emerged during the excavation of the tunnels that would later become the city’s subway system. Suddenly the streets of Halperin’s childhood became sites of geological wonder to her, and in this work the artist overlays personal histories of her home city with the sites at which other rocks and minerals were found.
At the top of the stairs, we are greeted by Boiling Milk (Solfataras) (1999), a photograph recording Halperin boiling a small pan of milk using the geothermal heat from the sulphur springs of Krafla volcano in Iceland, in a moment of connection between geology and domesticity. Thinking back on this work now, Halperin asks ‘how do you make contact with the inside of the earth? How do we form personal relationships with active geological processes?’
The concerns of this early work – what Halperin calls ‘geologic intimacy’ – are again borne out in her most recent work The Rock Cycle (from stromatolites to diamonds (2026). This work traces a line from some of the earliest life forms on the planet – stromatolites – through to marbles and diamonds formed in their wake, each stone etched and inked by the artist with delicate fossil-like marks. Halperin writes ‘We are part of this conglomerate family too – a deep time calcium carbonate family tree stretching from stromatolites and ammonites to molluscs, sirenians, starfish, coral and fish, to limestone, marble, minerals, our teeth and bones.’
The objects that make up The Rock Cycle (Spring, Summer, Autumn) (2021/2026) and Physical Geology (Cave cast/slow time) (2008–9) were all made at the Fontaines Pétrifiantes in France, a fast-acting petrifying cave, harnessing natural geological processes to create sculptural objects. Those in Physical Geology were created using moulds into which carbonate-rich water was channelled in order create what can be understood as cast stalactites. The mould, created by Halperin, depicts an imagined trace fossil of some ancient microorganism, recording traces of life, air bubbles and tracks.
What interests Halperin is the ability rocks have to tell stories about life – life that has left its mark, however minutely, in the matter of the earth. This is something that in recent years has been the concern of scientists looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life, a search that Halperin has glimpsed through joining a recent virtual field trip to Mars. If fossil evidence of life is to be found, it is most likely in the guise of ‘extremophiles’, microscopic lifeforms that can withstand extreme conditions. These form the basis of Halperin’s series of drawings We Are All Extremophiles (2024–26). In her text work, An Art History of Mars (2026), Halperin describes the unexpected of emotion of exploring Mars from afar – of finding the strange familiarity of its geological formations, and of realising that the iron that makes its surface red is also that which makes our blood red. She writes ‘I thought of my father, who loved Carl Sagan – that we are made of star stuff – composed of minerals formed in the interiors of collapsing stars.’
All photos by Ruth Clark.
Exhibition Walkthrough