The Blue Prints are responses to sea ice movement, tectonic plate shifts, glaciers and glacial melt in Iceland. The inspiration for these works came from site visits to some of Iceland’s most prominent landscape features. I wanted to convey the energy of these features by enacting movement and energetic forces. I found the landscapes desolate and powerful, an unfamiliar volcanic land with fire at its core and ice at its extremes.
I etched aluminium plates in a copper sulphate bath, to enable the use of tone in my etchings. I also achieved a range of textures and a painterly quality–the results proved unpredictable. These materials produced a rawness, present in the landscapes I’m depicting. The lines were slightly burred and gave the works a looseness, to capture the essence of a blue print, an overarching perspective of a space. Looking down to span a large area and letting go of specific details to gain a sense of the overall vastness of the land.
I’m influenced by Immanuel Kant’s theory about phenomena, of observing natural events and processes such as weather, temperature, erosion–these works focused on ice movement, tectonic plate shifts and glacial melt. I investigated how these systems of information related to matter and energy changing form under varying circumstance.
Shift (Mulajokull Glacier), Lift (Torfajokull Glacier), Drift (Pjorsa River), Cleft (Kolgrima River) L-R
Medium: Aluminium etching on 300gsm Hahnemuhle, 2016
Size: 22cm x 15cm, edition of 10
Amanda Page 