Cape Farewell Greenland Voyage 2007

So a very long journey up here via Stockholm, Oslo, Tromso then here to Longyearbyen. Arrived with snow falling, although not much has settled (leaving the textured rock surfaces drawn and enhanced with white dust).
There is something about returning here- so far away from the life style we live back down South and yet now very familiar to me.
The age of this land, the rock formations. You can read through it’s history, the strata laid down over millenniums, exposed, eroded and cracked into dust by the cold and ice.
It’s a raw reality that belittles everything else and puts this world back into perspective. Lonyearbyen is like a Wild West frontier town, one of the changes though is that now they are beginning to place advertising flags down the main street, lets hope this is kept to a minimum, and in fact shouldn’t be allowed at all !
Have tried today to pick up a Polar Bear bone from the Sysselmannen’s Environmental Adviser – it was put aside for us 2 years ago. Seems that I now need a CITES agreement to import it back to the UK for a piece of work Heather and I are working on. Hope Heather can get this for me by my return here next week!

Hear from artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey as they carve a “Snow Cam” and create their glacial “Ice Lens” during the 2005 expedition. (Duration: 1:54 mins)

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Dan Harvey
Artist (UK)

Dan has collaborated with Heather Ackroyd since 1990. In 2007 Ackroyd & Harvey created their most ambitious public artwork to date, FlyTower on the National Theatre’s Lyttleton flytower. Here the artists grew seedling grass directly on the exterior of one of London’s landmarks, transforming this iconic building into a living artwork of massive proportions.

Since 2003 Dan and Heather have made three expeditions to Svalbard with Cape Farewell, investigating and responding to the effects of climate change. Their major work, Stranded was created for the Cape Farewell exhibition Art & Climate Change. Dan voyages with both the Youth and Greenland Expeditions in 2007.
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