The Library is a selection of specimens and artworks brought about by the Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin. As the first recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship at National Museums Scotland she has had the opportunity over the last year to research the collections and to make new works in response to what she’s seen.
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The Library is a selection of specimens and artworks brought about by the Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin. As the first recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship at National Museums Scotland she has had the opportunity over the last year to research the collections and to make new works in response to what she’s seen. This exhibition brings together many of the ideas and prevailing concerns that have been central to Ilana’s work since she stopped carving stone into sculptures, and started to wonder about the stone itself. The starting point for Ilana at National Museums Scotland was the discovery that some samples of mica are called ‘books’. They do after all look like books; the thin layers of the mineral peel apart in complete sheets, like pages in any volume. The comparison is more than physical though, as the American writer John McPhee observed in his book In Suspect Terrain (1983) ‘Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.’
The tektites shown in a case in The Library are the records of a meteorite impact, formed in the intense heat caused by a piece of debris from outer space crashing into the Earth. Nearby the strange quality of desert glass is material evidence of another meteorite, this time falling in the desert and melting the sand. These records written in stone are legible, and like words on a page, they conjure a picture in our minds. The Library is also a repository of time, for rocks are the records of both events and of time itself. They can encompass the shortest of moments to enormous swathes of time, from the split second that the tektite formed to the 800 million years that the mica has survived. Geology inevitably deals with incomprehensible amounts of time, as the Edinburgh-native and father of modern geology, James Hutton famously concluded, ‘we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’ Ilana tempers these infinite expanses of time by finding human connections. On 23 January 1973 the volcano Eldfell on the island of Heimaey started to erupt. By the time it had finished on 5 July of the same year the island had increased in size by over 2km². Ilana was born in 1973 and in 2003 she travelled to the 30 year-old volcano and its surrounds on Heimay to celebrate their joint emergence. In 2012, as Ilana and the eastern part of Heimay approached their 40th birthdays Ilana journeyed there once more and found a white agate in the red lava flow. Born in the same year, Ilana and the agate currently share the same time, it is a rock with a human timescale. In the exhibition other rocks are a mere one year old, forming in the mineral rich waters of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland over the course of 2012. In another artwork a coral meets a marble, the same substance, just several million years apart. This library doesn’t follow the usual conventions of classification. Many of its holdings would cause difficulties for the librarian, one single volume might concern itself with natural history, time travel and personal biography all at the same time; nature and culture here are not easy to separate. A cluster of pebbles form a swirl, from small grains in the centre increasing to little stones in the outer edges. It is a diminutive work of art, but one made by snail to provide a home. In another case, a wooden structure made by Ilana has been gradually encrusted in limestone. Made over four months by the slow trickle of limestone rich waters in a cave in the Auvergne, it seems possible that, in Ilana’s words, ‘a cave can make art’. The final object for study in The Library, encapsulates this difficulty of classification. This small specimen of Galena, the natural mineral form of lead (II) sulfide, is all that remains from a microbe feast. This mineral which was food, sits not far from rocks made of the tiny bodies of once living creatures, and disrupts the most simple of classifications of animal, mineral and vegetable. Ilana Halperin’s library is nature and culture, microseconds and millennia, life and afterlife, all together and at the same time.
Bryony Bond, curator of The Library, National Museum Scotland, Edinburgh 2013