Melt

An exhibition by Jean Duncan in the Tower Foyer Gallery, University of Dundee

7 February - 29 March 2014
Mon-Fri 09.30-20.30 Sat 09.30-16.30
Admission Free

An exhibition of paintings by Jean Duncan, artist in residence at CECHR (the Centre for Environmental Change & Human Resilience). Jean recently spent time at the British Geological Survey observatory at Virkisjökull, Iceland, and was funded by a Dundee Visual Arts Awards and BGS to make drawings linked to fieldwork.  

The observatory site in south-east Iceland is a base for studying the evolution of the glacier and the surrounding landscape and how both are affected by regional climate. Sensors at the site are constantly collecting climate and seismic data. Repeated high resolution surveys study how both the glacier and land surface, and the deposits beneath, change over time.

Jean worked alongside scientists who were very familiar with the glacier, and became aware of the changes that occurred daily, recording these in sketches and drawings:

“Spending hours in the same area, looking and looking again at the nature of the ice allowed me to focus on the elements that made up the glacier’s  landscape, most particularly flow patterns in the melting ice, the supra streams and the river water.”

Surface pattern in rivers assists the hydrologists in identifying the fastest flow in a river and has interested artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Bridget Riley.

The exhibition opens on Friday 7 February with talks at 2.30pm in Baxter Room 1.36 from BGS scientists Dr Jez Everest, Brighid Ó Dochartaigh, and Dr Andrew Black.