Landscape in Pain: #1646

The work included in this exhibition catalogue is Landscape in Pain #1446, a digital stop-action film. The video is part of a multi-layered visual and social response to construction of the industrial scale Viking Energy Wind Farm in Shetland, whose landscape has been in a constant state of injury since 2020. I use drawing and photography to investigate the subject of pain as a metaphor for the body in pain, striving to give form to the rape of the landscape, to personal and collective grief, an expression of solastalgia (Albrecht 2005). The title points to the complexity of pain (Scarry, 1988) and the relationship between the human and non-human. This complexity is mirrored in the urgency of the climate crisis for which there is no straightforward solution. With Landscape in Pain I strive to make visible extractivist principles and practices as industrialisation threatens to destabilise Shetland, leading to depopulation,
or as many believe, the 21st century clearances.

The exhibition was realised at The Arctic Congress in Bodø Norway. It is a production of the New Genre Arctic Art Education initiative consisting of multiple art-based projects, in which two Thematic Networks of UArctic, Arctic Sustainable Art and Design and Children of the Arctic, combine participatory practices of arts and psychosocial work to develop sustainable art and education.

The Arctic Sustainable Art and Design (ASAD) Thematic Network of UArctic have introduced the concept of ‘new genre Arctic art’ to define and describe contemporary artistic interventions, public art and performances that include participation, activism and engagement with contemporary issues of the North and the Arctic. The term is based on the concept of ‘new genre public art’ that was coined by Lacy in 1995 to describe a type of public art that creates participatory, political and aesthetic events rather than producing typical art works, like sculptures in public spaces. Lacy characterised new genre public art as activist in nature, as it has often been created outside of institutional structures and has engaged artists in direct collaboration with participants to address social and political issues.

In the Arctic region, the extraction of natural resources, climate change and the cultural rights of Indigenous peoples have been the main contemporary issues of interest to artists and artist-researchers.