The glacier work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) are a few of her best-known works. When the Scottish artist visited the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in Might 1949, she couldn’t have imagined that the panorama she encountered there would maintain her curiosity for nearly a lifetime. This new ebook, which presents quite a lot of approaches and responses, is the primary complete account of those works, exploring their origins and growth, in addition to the function they performed in Barns-Graham’s profession. It’s apt they’re celebrated now, 75 years after her go to to Switzerland.
She couldn’t have imagined [the glacial landscape] would maintain her curiosity for nearly a lifetime
Following her coaching at Edinburgh School of Artwork, Barns-Graham moved to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1940, becoming a member of a artistic group that included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, and centred on the house of Margaret Mellis and Adrian Stokes. Because the artwork historian Alice Strang’s essay explains, right now Hepworth and Gabo labored with spirals, cavities and tensions, whereas Mellis, Peter Lanyon and John Wells explored Constructivist practices. For her half, Barns-Graham fell again on the observational drawing of her art-school coaching, though it might not be lengthy earlier than shifts in her portray noticed a flattening of the image area, an curiosity within the geometry of type, and an interrogation of the connection between inside and exterior.
The Grindelwald journey was a watershed when, as Strang places it, the artist developed a “glacial” vocabulary such that meltwater holes, striations, ovals and vertical constructions of monumental mass grew to become the frequent language of her icescapes and her “complete expertise” of the glacier. Barns-Graham’s fame was bolstered with group and solo exhibitions of the glacier work, which reoccurred in three subsequent intervals of her profession—the late Seventies, the mid-Eighties and 1994.
The archival materials round Barns-Graham’s journey to Switzerland is just not intensive. But, because the archivist Tilly Heydon explains, the gathering of letters, images, notes, drawings and exhibition ephemera convey us as near her expertise as is feasible. This supplies essential context for the work and drawings in addition to proof of the lasting impression of the journey.
Modern contributions
That context is widened with contributions from modern poets. Holly Corfield Carr’s response explores how a single glacier portray can spark the creativeness, firing new views on the peculiar and the extraordinary. She picks up on Barns-Graham’s observe from 1965, that “in a number of days a thinness might grow to be a gap”. Carr’s play with language ends with an ideal gap throughout the printed phrases on the web page: concrete poetry imitating artwork. Maybe her most beautiful statement is that this thinness is “like a breathless sort of anagram” in its silent transformation.
One other poet, Alyson Hallett, takes a unique strategy in her “Glacier Nocturn”, evaluating Barns-Graham’s expertise of the glacier with that of the town at evening, and the artist’s physique with an ice cave, folding concepts of structure and music seamlessly right into a cornucopia of imaginative considering. A 3rd artistic response comes from the film-maker Mark Cousins, within the type of an imagined letter to Barns-Graham that considers his personal preconceptions, which shift following a go to to the Alps. This journey was, on his account, a profound expertise that modified his sense of who Barns-Graham was, bringing recent understanding of the complexity she noticed within the glacier.
A glaciologist’s view of the work, given by Peter Nienow, is probably probably the most fascinating chapter within the ebook. Nienow offers a transparent rationalization of glacial phenomena for the layperson, however he does way more than that. He appears carefully at Barns-Graham’s photos, making a visible comparability between them and images of glacial options. In so doing it turns into clear that the “abstraction” of Barns-Graham’s work pertains to the character of supraglacial lakes—floor meltwater and chaotic crevassing, ice blocks and seracs. The revelation is fascinating.
The complete catalogue of the glacier works is a useful factor of this ebook, however maybe its most admirable high quality is the wide selection of authors, all bringing totally different views to bear upon them. It’s the mixture of these views that affords the reader a wealthy and nuanced understanding of the work and Barns-Graham herself. Wanting visiting Grindelwald Glacier in particular person, the whole expertise of this ebook is definitely the following neatest thing.
• Rob Airey (ed.) with contributions by Holly Corfield Carr, Mark Cousins, Alyson Hallett, Tilly Heydon, Peter Nienow, Cassia Pennington and Alice Strang, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers, Lund Humphries, 128pp, 115 color and 10 b/w illustrations, £19.99 (pb), revealed 7 October
• Beth Williamson is an impartial author, critic and artwork historian, and is writing a ebook on the Scottish artist William Johnstone (1897-1981)
