Arc: an installation on Cornwallis Island. June 1989.
1989 June 15: It’s 2a.m. air is still, in the silence my boots crunch rocks and ice as I install a sculpture on an exposed cracked mesozoic rock. Hold- ing the magnetic steel bar my hair starts to crackle with electricity.A faint electronic sound sings out from this magnetized steel bow. What’s happening— it’s responding to the — what? Out here on this seemingly empty tundra I was alone, excited, mystified and spooked— Installation complete and harmonics continue to resonate along the shore as if it were ‘tuning’ the shimmering sea ice. Can’t sleep, the sun is already high. June 16: Announcement:‘Art Opening Down by the Big Rock on the Beach, artist in attendance.’ Scientists from the camp came by, checked it out and toasted the invisible force with invisible drinks. The harmonics remain a mystery. June 19: We land within seven degrees of the geomagnetic pole, and we have a couple of hours before the ice becomes unsafe. Out of this sea ice, the light is even more intense and pure, everything is sharp edged, even the ice crystals in the air. I’ve lost my sense of perspective, Excerpts from an Arctic Journal Gwen Boyle
what is far seems so near.The silence is silencing. I sit listening. In this light I see the Arctic’s long unbroken bow of time. June 21: Summer solstice, I’m as close to the north pole ever I’ll be. Lying on my back, I watch the day turn completely on its inclined axis toward the sun before I turn southward. Arc is a magnetic sculpture which was installed on the tundra at approximately 7 degrees from the North Geomagnetic Pole during a twelve year peak period of intense solar flare activity. Predictably it responded by hunting and seeking the concentrated magnetic field lines. Unpredictably, it responded with electronic sounds, which I later found to be similar to those transmitted back by Voyager in its orbit around Mars.This Arctic installation was dismantled Canada Day, July 1, 1989. —taken from the Arc exhibition catalogue, OR Gallery,Vancouver, BC with the permission of the artist. Tuning was an exhibition held at the Richmond Gallery October 1993.
Beginning her career as a visual artist in northern Canada, Gwen Boyle later studied sculpture at the Vancouver School of Art, graduating in 1974. For the past two decades her focus has been on installation works and site specific projects located in galleries, urban areas, parkland and in the arctic. Her intent is to participate in a dialogue with nature and to employ elemen- tal material specific to the site, drawing on its embedded memories of time, universal and human.This can be most clearly understood in her installation Arc, built on the continental ice shelf during a residency with the Polar Continental Research Station.
This installation (above) included a 50’x6” glass bar suspended by wire and steel, 16’ & 12’ simulated whale bones and the audio of the harmon- ics produced by Arc — the sound from the magnetised sculpture was taped on site by J.Vistig of Kaarvonen Films, and later filtered, mixed and re-recorded by Robert McNevin.
On Site review 11
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Spring 2004
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