Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance

Hello, I’m Sarah Casey. I’m an artist who works mainly through drawing, although it’s a kind of sculptural drawing. This is the audio description for my exhibition here at Henry Moore Institute, Negative Mass Balance.

You’re hearing the sound of water and ice in front of the Recherche Glacier, Svalbard sourced by the Henry Moore Institute at freesound.org.

Over the past five years, I’ve been interested in glacial archaeology, and that is objects that are emerging out of ice, which has been preserved for maybe a hundred or even a thousand years.

When you enter the gallery, the first thing that you notice is large translucent hangings in front of the windows on the left-hand side. These transparent sheets cascade down to the floor. This is the work Emergency! What Was Is. In the middle and on the right-hand corner of the room are tall thin wooden stands, each with a tiny round glass watch face with a painting of a mountain landscape on it, casting a shadow of this image onto the surface of the stand. These works are called Ice Watch. Then on the wall is framed work from the Ablations series of risographs.

Emergency! What Was Is a long translucent drawing made with waxed paper and the material looks a bit like ice and the surface is pierced through with tiny pinpricks and this creates an outline image of fragments of glacial archaeology and the pinpricks let light into the room. So as you move towards the work in the room, the light will change and different parts of the image become illuminated. So if you like, the drawings are kind of alive in a kind of dance or dialogue with the visitors, but they’re also changing as well with the light outside as it becomes lighter and darker and the weather changes. And I work with wax because it’s sensitive to heat, so like the ice and the archaeology, it’s sensitive to the environmental conditions. In other words, it’ll melt and disintegrate if it gets too hot.

Glacial archaeology is the study of human artifacts that are preserved in ice, so in high mountain areas in glaciers or typically in ice patches, and in this cold, dry environment, fugitive organic materials such as textiles, leather and hair can survive for many thousands of years. So they’re not found in the ground, but on it as the ice around them melts away.

Finds like these are exceptionally rare and they actually provide some of the earliest evidence of textile cultures in Europe. Also, unlike terrestrial archaeology, so archaeology in the ground, glacial archaeology doesn’t follow the usual stratigraphic rules because ice is a shifting, moving being. It’s a kind of unruly or uncanny archive of the past. So you might have twentieth century finds emerging right next to something ten times their age.

Other works in the room include the Ice Watch works. The ice watches are tiny glass watch faces. They’re about four centimetres in diameter. They’re mounted on tall, thin wooden stands, about 110 centimetres tall. They look a bit like a strange scientific instrument. When we look closely, we can see that the glass has an image of a mountain landscape. It’s kind of really pale though and quite hard to see. We can’t see this at all angles. However, the light passes through the glass and casts a shadow of the image of the mountains on the white surface of the wooden stand.

The watch faces have been painted with glacial flour. Glacial flour is the fine rock powder that’s made by the action of a glacier moving over rock over many hundreds, thousands of years, scouring down the rock until it becomes like dust. Then when the glacier melts, this fine powder gets left behind. I saw this when I was working at some of these sites and I realised that, like the archaeology, it’s another form of appearance through ice loss.

The Ablations are a series of risographs that came from documenting the drawing experiments that I’ve done outside in the Alps where I exposed a group of wax drawings at glacial sites in the valley in Switzerland. So what we see in the image is like a mountain landscape printed in gold coloured ink so they have a kind of brown, sepia hue like a faded photograph or an old newspaper.

But the surface is reflective, so printed in reflective ink, it means that they kind of shimmer and move in and out of visibility. I wanted to see what effect the alpine sun would have upon this wax surface. Obviously the wax I thought would melt under heat, which it really did, quite fast, it melted quite fast in some cases.

So what we see in the risographs is drawings placed in the moraine, some balled up resembling rocks or ice, and some laid flat and exposed to the sun as the heat of the day fell upon them.

Alongside Negative Mass Balance, I’ve also curated a small display of items from the Henry Moore Institute Archive, and this is on display upstairs in the library. So the exhibition in the library, called From Dust to Dawn, looks at items in the Henry Moore Institute Archive which reveal artists workings with the ephemeral materiality of time and natural processes.

Artists included in this exhibition are Helen Chadwick, Catherine Bertola, Keir Smith, Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash and Roger Ackling. And there’s also a short film about the research behind my work with glacial archaeology made in collaboration with the contemporary artist Rebecca Birch.