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 guide, which presents quite a lot of approaches and responses, is the primary complete account of those works, exploring their origins and improvement, 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 neighborhood 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 kind, 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 buildings of monumental mass turned the widespread language of her icescapes and her “complete expertise” of the glacier. Barns-Graham’s repute 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 just isn’t intensive. But, because the archivist Tilly Heydon explains, the gathering of letters, pictures, notes, drawings and exhibition ephemera deliver us as near her expertise as is feasible. This gives essential context for the work and drawings in addition to proof of the lasting affect 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 word from 1965, that “in a couple of days a thinness might turn out 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 form 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 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 pondering. 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 contemporary understanding of the complexity she noticed within the glacier.
A glaciologist’s view of the work, given by Peter Nienow, is probably essentially the most fascinating chapter within the guide. Nienow provides a transparent clarification of glacial phenomena for the layperson, however he does rather more than that. He appears carefully at Barns-Graham’s photographs, 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 guide, however maybe its most admirable high quality is the big 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 guide is definitely the subsequent smartest 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), printed 7 October
• Beth Williamson is an impartial author, critic and artwork historian, and is writing a guide on the Scottish artist William Johnstone (1897-1981)
