Dundee Mountain Film Festival

Exhibitions

 

White Noise: 69° North - Kirsty Maguire

Kirsty is a Teaching Fellow at Dundee School of Architecture. Her exhibition of photographs was previously shown last year at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee. Kirsty explains her exhibition in her own words,

"I was inspired to travel to East Greenland by seeing photos my great-uncle, Douglas Scott, took in the 1950s and 1970s. After years of dreaming and many months of planning, on 5 May last year, I stepped out of a Twin Otter onto a huge glacier in the Sortebrae mountains in East Greenland. I was, quite literally, blinking – as the sunlight made the snow twinkle and the immense scale and pristine landscape turned from pictures in my mind into a reality. For a very long time I had tried to imagine what it would actually feel like in a sea of white, in temperatures down to -20 degrees C, 1000 km from home, with only five other women, some unclimbed peaks and a very large ice cap for company.

The landscape is truly spectacular, with snowy mountains stretching in all directions. The air is so clear, judging distance is very difficult and several times I set off on a journey, only to realise that some plan revision was required to understand the scale of the mountains. During our trip, we climbed 13 mountains, 12 of them previously unclimbed, ski toured between camps and explored several valleys. For part of the trip, we split into two groups, with two of us ski touring up to the icecap and climbing there for a week, and the others choosing to climb the highest mountain in the area.

One of the most lasting impressions of spending so long there is the quality of the silence. In good weather, it is so still that I could hear my own heart beating, a single bird call got all of us rushing out of our tents (we didn’t see the bird, it was flying too high) and a helicopter was heard two mountain ranges away.

In that type of silence, small sounds become so much more pronounced and define activities, weather conditions and the time of day. The squeak of snow under boots indicates that it is pretty cold out there. Footsteps brushing through powder snow sound like wind in dry grasses whereas, later in the trip when it got warmer, stepping through melting snow sounded like walking through damp sugar. And when that icy slush layer froze, it crunched like dry cornflakes. This refrozen snow indicated ‘night time’, as it was 24 hour daylight and the sun ran in circles above us, almost as though it was a bit of a joke.

During the day, when the snow and ice are melting, snow and rock avalanches tumble down the cliffs, rumbling and crashing, with cold ‘night’ bringing refreezing - silencing cliffs, but bringing the creaking of the moving glacier on which we are camped. Around camp, the roar of a stove indicates hot water. And everything zips – sleeping bags, inner and outer jackets, fleeces, tent inners and tent fly sheets. To get out everything has to be unzipped, and to get back inside, all zipped up again.

But when the wind arrives, not only does the temperature plummet, but the silence departs. In general, we had good weather during our trip, but we were tent bound for seven days, with one day in the eye of the storm. During this time the tent flaps endlessly and millions of ice crystals are hurled against the fly sheet, sounding like vigorous rustling of a thin plastic bag. There is no escape. Going outside in a storm gives a different flapping sound as my jacket and hat flap against my ears. Not that being outside for any length of time is anything but a battle against the cold, so it’s straight back inside to listen to the tent and the ‘plastic bag rustle’. As the gusts blow through or the wind lessens, it can be measured by listening. And when it stops completely it leaves a ringing in my ears and a return to silence. A silence that is not golden, but white – with an inspiring twinkle".

Clare Yarrington is a visual artist, based in rural central Scotland. Clare says about her work, "I am interested in how our environment has been formed and how we interact with it. This relationship is dynamic and involves not only the elemental forces of nature but also our perception of time. In the same way as the past is imperfectly preserved, so we remember our own experiences in fragments. I am intrigued at how to visually express this".

"My previous experience working as an archaeologist informs my work, as does my enjoyment of rock climbing and mountaineering. Directly observed work of the landscape and the human figure provide the basis for more interpretative prints, sequences of images and collages. I like to move freely between different media such as charcoal, pastel, oil paint, collograph printing, to name just a few, as each provide a particular effect and character".

"Collages can be more experimental and allow me to explore varying perspectives and juxtapose different ideas and images. Using scraps of my own previously discarded work as visual fragments I collage then draw, paint, scrape away and collage again if needed. The actual fragments of collage can correlate directly to fragments of memory, but in many ways it is more like virtual archaeological reconstruction. From the fragments of past work I 'reconstruct' the 'evidence' to make a new interpretation. The result is full of ambiguities, as the past and our memories always are, but the coming together of differing visual ideas can bring about new possibilities that would never have made any other way"