Ellie Irons

Gathering & Building...

This month has been extremely satisfying. I often spend early mornings out in the dewy forests and meadows of this island, gathering project materials (mostly dead sticks & branches). It’s very quiet, contemplative work, except for the moments when I startle a wild creature, or one startles me (generally a large Dutch hare or a panicked pheasant- they come bursting out of the brush as I move along).

When I have what I need for the day, plus maybe a cup of blackberries for breakfast, I bundle the sticks together and cycle back to camp.

There, in the afternoon, I build…also quiet, contemplative work, punctuated by the occasional difficulty (the sudden snap of a branch that breaks in my face with a loud crack), or the arrival of a curious visitor or a noisy tractor (see below!).  All in all, things are very peaceful in my make-shift outdoor studio. At this point, I have just one week to go- by next Saturday everything will complete, and I’ll have to head back to NYC and get my city life on again. Sigh!

A small death.

There are swallows everywhere on this island. They swoop and flit from the early morning to past sunset (10:00 pm, currently).  There are very few cars on the island but this little fellow managed to collide with one of them, just as I was passing on my bicycle. A friend picked him up and handed him to me. I’ve never held a wild creature so recently deceased. The tiny body was amazingly soft, warm and light; the fragile neck was utterly limp, and I felt I had to support the head with my fingertips to keep it in one piece. Sad, but also terribly beautiful.

Oh languishing blog!

I haven’t forgotten you! I just finished a really amazing week teaching acrylic painting and stick sculpture to an inspired bunch of 10-17 year olds at summer camp. Plus, I got to sleep in a tent under the pines, and saw the best milky way I’ve seen in years.  Here’s a shot of some of the paintings the kids came up with…I was trying to teach them about abstraction & alternative painting techniques, and for the most part, they did pretty well with it!

Plus, some images from my little corner of the arts classroom:

The longest day of the year...

Summer is really here now- today
(in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway) is the Summer solstice, the longest day of the year! I’ll be spending this day of extended sunshine in a land of overwhelming verdure and humidity (I’m visiting a friend in eastern Tennessee, the land of kudzu). I hope to have some decent kudzu photographs later on, but for now, here is my solstice image: the sun overhead, breaking through forest branches to illuminate one of my mass sculptures.

Sebastião Salgado's Genesis Project

I couldn’t help but feel quite skeptical when I first heard about photo-journalist Sebastião Salgado’s current project. This article, recently published in the New York Times, has piqued my interest a bit. Known for sociopolitically themed photography that chronicles the plight of the world’s poor and impoverished populations (and often criticized for romanticizing that plight), Salgado has now moved on to landscape.

The 67 year old photographer is midway through an epic 8 year quest to document the most pristine and “natural” landscapes the world has left to offer.  The project, dramatically titled “Genesis”, is touted as an exploration of the effects of modern industrial development on the environment. But rather than go the well-known route of Edward Burtynksy and others, Salgado has chosen to document those places he believes have somehow “escaped or recovered from” such effects- this allows him to seek out nature in its most “natural” form. In the four years the project has been underway, he has visited more than 20 locations across 5 continents, including the Galapagos, the remote mountains of Ethiopia, and soon the far reaches of Alaska.

As the Times article describes, “Genesis” is a “grand, romantic back-to-nature project, combining elements of both the literary pastoral and the sublime.”  It sounds as though the resulting photographs fall into a lineage carved out by Ansel Adams rather than Robert Capa or Cartier-Bresson.  Adams to was an environmentalist at heart, and used his work to promoted his cause, but his dedication to beauty has lead to the cherishing of his work as poster and calendar art. Salgado’s work has always had a haunting beauty, but that beauty is held in check by his frequent portrayal of human suffering. In stepping away from portraying the negative influences of industrialization, Salgado still retains an ambitious attitude and devotion to his cause:

I’m 100 percent sure that alone my photographs would not do anything. But as part of a larger movement, I hope to make a difference. It isn’t true that the planet is lost. We must work hard to preserve it.

Maybe this spirit can push the resulting photographs beyond the romantic or picturesque to a place where they can speak eloquently and effectively about the losses we face if we carry on at our current pace of industrialization.

Salgado’s final goal for “Genesis” is to create 32 visual essays, which would be displayed in major public parks and museums starting in 2012. Here, now is an aspect that particularly intrigues me: It’s my dream to show the work in Central Park, not in some building but outside among the trees.  So then would this display be totally public? And what would the effect be? Yes, now my curiosity is piqued, and I’ll be waiting to hear more as 2012 approaches.

Thorn Forest by the Black Sea

Following is one of the stranger highlights from our Romania trip. At the end of the Sulina arm of the Danube River Delta, where it meets the Black Sea, we came across a spectacularly forlorn forest of scrubby thorn trees and river-worn garbage:

While the initial impression of the place was one of desolation and waste, this marginal-looking environment was actually humming with life. The trees were festooned with scraps of plastic and tangled cloth and thread, and the ground was littered with mangled plastic bottles, but we saw more wildlife here in a few hours than in much of the rest of the trip. We startled feral wild horses with young colts, and snakes, lizards, turtles and frogs slipped away from us as we walked . We watched a muskrat swimming in the river, an ermine peered at us from the brush, and we heard the incessant buzz of birds and insects. Raptors and crows were dueling in the air overhead, and bee eaters and wagtails were plentiful.  The images below were taken by Dan:

The Delta, and a new exhibition

We are just back from a really special vacation/research trip to the Danube Delta in Romania. More pictures and thoughts from the trip to come!  In the meantime, I’m immersed in installing my show here at DeFKa in Assen, the Netherlands.  It opens tomorrow! Here is a bit of a preview, of the installation process:

Elspeth Diederix

I’m currently a little bit transfixed by the photography of Kenyan born Dutch artist Elspeth Diederix. A friend at Frank Mohr jotted her name down on a piece of scrap paper for me, telling me that her images were curious, a little strange, that I might like them. And indeed I do. She seems to be documenting through photography some of the phenomena I’m attempting to capture by building objects.  She has a show up this month at Museum Jan Cunen, in the south of the Netherlands. I wish I could see it, but it’s a long journey (for Holland, anyway) and I’m short on time as my visit here winds down. Below are a few of my favorite images, ripped from her site. They display a mix of ecological detail and ever-present human influence blended with suggestions of the supernatural. This combination intrigues me.

below are: verdwaalde lente, buttercups, azalea, agrifolio, holly

herman de vries

My work has been changing since I’ve been here in the Netherlands, and as a result, my professors and friends have been mentioning artists that are new to me. One recent discovery is Dutch artist herman de vries (b. 1931), pictured here with his piece from earth (2007, earth rubbings on paper). 

I recently had the chance to see this piece and others at the Kroller Mueller Museum (an amazing place, located in the Hoge Veluwe National Park- more pics on my flickr)

I feel particularly lucky to have stumbled across de vries’ work in the context of the Kroller Mueller. The exhibition, titled “unity”, is a tight little retrospective that groups de vries’ work thematically. It is spread over four rooms, and each room takes a theme: “Researcher and artist”, “Accident and Perspective”, “Travel and nature”, and “Western and Eastern Philosophy”. De vries’ has a strong streak of the romantic, but it is a tempered one (perhaps hermetic-romantic-conceptualist could descibe him?).  Viewing his work in the midst of this strangely utopic museum, situated within a huge sculpture garden in the center of a sprawling national park, felt just right. De vries has, to me, a startling ability to isolate seemingly mundane bits of nature and invest them with visual potency- the work can be lyrical and beautiful, but it is also rigorous and carefully executed. While often cryptic, it feels purposeful.  Perhaps this rigor comes from the artist’s former life as a botanist, a career he carries on to some degree in his art, much of which involves preserving and presenting botanical specimens. Below are:

petasites hybridus, 22.05.02 
64 x daucus carota, 2001 (detail)
148 x salix elaeagnos, 1993

(ripped from woolgathersome)

From the exhibiton catalogue by Daniel van der Poel:

“Although de vries derives his methods from science, he is averse to its conventions. A great deal of knowledge is lost, he believes, because of science’s strict, selective way of working. For this reason he focuses on collecting and preserving knowledge (particularly in the area of plants) that is at risk of being lost.”

It seems that in all disciplines and walks of life there is a place for those who seek to record and remember knowledge that is being rapidly lost in our ever-changing world.  Art can be one compelling way to pass that knowledge along.

Masses from the Beach

The island of Schiermonnikoog is mostly national park, surrounded by mudflats sloping slowly into the North Sea. Buried in the soft sand along the beach, there are masses of organic material (seaweed, fish bones, shells) bound together with the plastic fibers from fishing nets and ropes.  These lumps/knots roll around in the sea, gathering bits and pieces, until they wash up on the shore, where I discover them and haul them home to the studio. They can be quite beautiful: