(September 26, 2023)
Dear Ayan,
I am writing to you from my home in Glasgow where I have spent the afternoon clearing and preparing the room where I work for Autumn, and for our conversation about your time this past summer on residency in Scotland. I am just back from Heimaey – a small island off the Southern coast of Iceland which we both know in our own way, due to the emergence of the Eldfell volcano which was born in the middle of one freezing January night in 1973. There we had the pleasure of showing an early work of yours entitled Rare Earth, which is composed of Earth material from Eldfell on canvas. The piece forms part of the exhibition A Meeting with Eldfell, which marks the 50th birthday of the volcano, and features work by contributors from around the world who have all, in some way, encountered Eldfell. I thought we had never yet met in person, but you reminded me had years ago when I took you and your friend on a tour of the Glasgow School of Art, then we almost met again as part of the exhibition Flesh Arranges Itself Differently here at The Hunterian. Early drawings of mine related to the Eldfell eruption were neighbours with your work. At the time Dominic Paterson, mentioned you had also made work about Eldfell. I can’t remember if Dominic told me you buried your sleeping bag at the foot of Eldfell for 6 months, or if I imagined that. So, to begin with – did you bury your sleeping bag deep into the lava from 1973? And if so, do you recall the inclination that led you to do it?
Picturing this gestural, performative action at the slopes of the volcano reminds me of a story about a work by Roman Signer that also took place in Iceland. He set up his tent in a canyon, then added a mic inside the tent, linked to speakers outside. As he slept, his snores rumbled across the canyon. In a visceral physical way, the body becomes the geologic act. Tectonic rumbling as plates move. Glaciers scraping the undersides of volcanic mountains… Your sleeping bag resting under lava at the foot of Eldfell is somehow quite an intimate act, it merges the domestic and the geologic in a very particular way. How do you think about the fluidity between these vocabularies?
It’s hard for me to write at the moment. When you reached out to see about a written conversation, I was still in Heimaey, preparing and installing the Eldfell exhibition. Out of my bedroom window I could see the sibling volcanoes of Eldfell and the elder volcano Helgafell. As you described in your text for the accompanying publication, “What was a roar of eruption in Eldfell has been replaced by a tranquil reality.” We thought a lot about how for those of us from ‘off island’ and places far from Vestmannaeyjar, we could project what we needed to onto Eldfell and the story around its eruption. The terror of the evacuation in the middle of the night, homes devoured by lava and ash, the loss of everything you know, of objects, small family treasures, and even the view out of your garden – first there was an open arable field, and then it became a monster spewing lava and ash in the pitch-black night – this, in a sense, was abstract for us.
When I first went to the island, and the volcano, I knew I would soon be burying my father, and the not very subtle – though unconscious at the time – leap of drawing house after house buried by ash became one way of understanding the impending loss of my father, of mortality, and cycles of life between us and the Earth, a geologic intimacy of sorts. I felt some kind of deep comfort imagining sharing my life with a volcano the same age – both of us born in 1973 – that we could both be 30, 40, 50 and on.
I also felt profoundly inspired by the incredible story of how people came together to save the island during the eruption – that they worked with rather than against nature to slow the lava flow, through pumping ocean water on it to cool it down, and ultimately, save the harbour before it was sealed off by the eruption. Somehow when I see your work on Eldfell, I simultaneously imagine ash and saltwater and new-born earth fusing in your hands, becoming Rare Earth.
Sorry for this long digression, but – I come back to why it’s hard for me to write in certain ways just now. The earthquake in Morocco happened while I was still on Heimaey. One of my closest friends lives in the Medina in Marrakesh. She was not at home when the earthquake hit, as she was filming in the desert, but her home, family, friends, dogs, her cat and birds, were still there. She waited for days to hear if her house would be marked by a red X – demolish – or a yellow X – possible to save. We spoke often, and then in the midst of this, my partner fell and fractured her shoulder and soon after, my beautiful dog who I have shared the last 15 years of my life with, died. Not long before, I lost my mother and my mother-in-law. When I was reflecting on my imminent return to the volcano for 50, I began to worry, what would it feel like to be there, knowing all of them were not. Then, an urgent and enlivening response began to grow – do something life-full – and A Meeting with Eldfell was born.
Back on Heimaey, I would look out of the window, and see the volcanoes, still and quiet. I guess it means I am writing from a place of thinking about loss, change, grief, deep, deep time, and nhow we are situated in it, how writing and making work about our relationship with this active Earth feels very different when it’s actually active.
As soon we will begin work on a collaborative edition related to another volcano – the catastrophic eruption of Mount Pelee in 1902, different models of practice come to mind. 28,000 people died almost in an instant, in the pyroclastic eruption of that volcano. But, the story is even worse than that. There was a local election due to take place on the island, and though there were many indicators that the volcano was about to erupt, local politicians refused to let anyone evacuate, in order to keep them on the island for the vote. In the end, all of them – except for 5 people – died in the eruption. One survivor was imprisoned, saved by the thick walls of his cell.
Following this catastrophic event, an astonishing geological phenomenon was witnessed for the first time in human history. The Tower of Pelée, a volcanic obelisk emerged from the crater of the volcano. It was said to be twice the height of the Washington Monument and equal in volume to the Great Pyramids. Upon observation of this geological monument, the geologist Angelo
Heilprin simply stated it was,
A memorial of nature for the 30,000 dead who are lying buried in the city.
Within a year, the tower was gone, eroding into the depths of the crater. I think about this horrific event, and the needless death of so many, and then about the eruption of Eldfell – where everyone was evacuated off the island over one long night. There is much more here to discuss – but I come back to thinking about the deep and intrinsic humanity in your practice. Of paying attention to each scrap of fabric, giving something all the time it needs to age and change, of bringing things that normally would not live together into a kind of harmony that acknowledges the life of each part, on its own terms.
You asked me to enter into a conversation with you about your time in Scotland, and some of our shared and overlapping interests – which I fully intended to do – but instead I want to tell you – I found a beautiful crystal on the slopes of Eldfell on my 50th birthday, which as it turns out is also the 50th birthday of your sister. And to let you know – I have it for her – and look forward to passing it along to you, so that you can give your sister a sparkling mineral that is as old as she is.
This letter forms part of a longer correspondence with the artist Ayan Farah, first featured on the website of the Roberts Institute of Art in October 2023.