SEA OF ICE

I have been working in the studio on a piece that, through the bulk of impasto, has started to fester with the suggestion of terminal decay. I attach a detail here, as the piece is not yet complete:

I began thinking of the loneliness of that piece of metal, simulated here in a warm studio in acrylic paint on canvas. Where did it arrive at such a state of degradation? - and, although I never make humans explicit in my work, I wonder who has suffered within this metal structure, which once protected, but now exposes them? What impact brought it to this state? Whose mistake made it so, and who was jolted from a snatched sleep between watches and implicated into the urgency of survival?
It is, of course, a sense of sublimity that provokes me to ponder these things.
When Piranesi engraved the ruins of imperial Rome, or the fictitious prisons or carceri, he suggested that ruins occupied a sublime place that was between completeness on one hand, and ultimate dissolution on the other. The contemplation of the kind of ruination depicted by Piranesi can provoke two associations in our minds, depending upon in which direction we choose to look: we can on one hand associate the ruin with the greatness of past civilisations, such as that of Rome (or in our case, a once proud ship, the very symbol of Modernity); or the ruin can remind us of blankness, of nothingness and of abjection.

  

Caspar David Friedrich’s work demonstrated that the full depth of abjection could be aestheticised. In his Sea of Ice/Wreck of Hope (1823-4) we find an image of the ruin that is no longer entropic in its origin: we confront the moment of Death itself. Here, a last remaining fragment of a ship’s poop is depicted being crushed by towering pinnacles of ice: the hope that underpinned a polar expedition has now collided with failure, and this collision reveals the awfulness of eternity to us; (the same typological scene was recorded a century later in the surviving cinematic and photographic images of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance being crushed by ice in his 1915 polar expedition, in which the emptiness and hopelessness is reinforced by the film’s silence).

The ruined ship therefore has a demonstrably special potency in suggesting abjection to us; as it had in these examples of the polar wastes. And, as I sit comfortably in my studio chair in Bath looking at the suggestion of distressed metal that has erupted onto my canvas, I am removed from the thin January squalls outside my window and transported to a place of bleakness and unimaginable terror.