Northern Lights
If you haven’t experienced a winter in the uppermost part of the arctic, it can be hard to convey its severity. Wind stabs like a knife in the sheer monochrome disorientation of a landscape obliterated by snow and ice. Month after cold arduous month; those that inhabit these parts of the world: Greenland, the northernmost points of Scandinavia, as well as vast swathes of Russia and Canada, often claim that their character is implicitly shaped by those long dark winters.
These places have been made familiar to us through received Romantic notions, cultural myths, stereotypes, and the prevalence of Scandi-noir films on streaming services. Our understanding of what it might mean to live through the long dark days and nights of winter, or the strange bright midnight sun of summer, is based therefore on hazy assumptions, popular culture, folklore, and mythology.
The Hyperboreoi, for example, were believed to be a Giant people who lived in a northern paradise of perpetual sunshine beyond the reaches of the god of the north wind. Their name located them within the Greek world; it combined the prefix hyper-, meaning “above,” and Boreas, the Greek name for the north wind. The Hyperboreoi demonstrated an ancient connection, probably based on trade, between northern and southern climes.
Author Graham Robb indicates in his 2013 book ‘The Ancient Paths’ that there is evidence the Greeks would have been aware of Druidic Culture in Wales and Ireland. There was a common perception that the Hyperborean lands may have been the lands inhabited by the Celts. Their reputation for feasting and a love of gold may have reinforced the connection in mythology and the Greek imagination.
Whilst Mediterranean or southern European female deer have no antlers, female Reindeer do. Hercules was tasked with capturing one of the golden antlers of the Ceryneian Hind or the Golden Hind, which was said to live in Hyperborea. Capable of outrunning an arrow in flight, the Golden Hind was known to have antlers like a stag and hooves of bronze. This story may also indicate an awareness by the Greeks of far northern cultures.
The Arctic is where the Aurora Borealis can be seen most clearly. Today, this phenomenon in the night sky is understood to be magnetic disturbances caused by solar wind, which send charged particles into our magnetospheric plasma. When they precipitate into the upper atmosphere, they emit light of varying colour and complexity. In Norse mythology however, the Aurora Borealis was believed to be a manifestation of the ’Beyond’ – implying the existence of life after death. The pulsating flashes of light across the sky were understood to be the sun’s reflection on the shields of the Valkyries. These warrior women on horseback, armed with spears and shields were, like the Irish myth of the Morrigan, known to decide the fate of those in battle, carrying their souls to Odin’s Valhalla, so that they might fight beside him at Ragnarök.
These tensions and associations between magic and myth, science and communication, introduce the essential principles of the work of Remco de Fouw. Tales Of Hyperborea plays with notions of truth and representation, a constant push and pull between the mythic and the actual. Every sculpture contains a kind of fraught, exquisite tension – on the one hand everything is fabricated with a deep and sensitive understanding of the cultural and mythological contexts that make a material charged, while on the other, such notions of truth are deliberately frustrated.
While the Aurora Borealis might not exactly be regarded by the scientific community as an event that showcases Valkyrie armour, discoveries made in recent years about the Northern Lights are no less magical. In a 2016 article in the National Geographic, for example, scientist Unto K. Laine proved that auroral sounds were emanating from above the treetops—70 metres above the Earth’s surface—during the times of the most intense light displays from the Aurora Borealis. These sounds were long considered to be imagined tales from folklore, however, he discovered that any pointed surface, like pine leaves and pinecones on the tops of trees, offer the perfect surface for auroral electricity to discharge. de Fouw has an abiding interest in the relationship between aural folklore and science. His visual response to the links between these two worlds is currently under development in his studio. Conceptually however, many of the works in Tales Of Hyperborea explore the tensions and connections between science and myth.
The Golden Hind (2021) for example, is constructed from standard issue pole climbing shoe attachments, which are strangely shaped strap-on shoe attachments, nick-named “Antlers” used by the Irish Electricity Supply Board (ESB). Welded together by the artist, they remind us of the myth of the deer sought by Hercules. The idea that appearances can be deceptive is of course a truism, and one that de Fouw clearly delights in constructing – but at the same time his work also subverts or exposes such deceptions, in order to explore where science and myth might become entangled, and, in so doing, what then might constitute a truth.
As with previous bodies of research that de Fouw has undertaken in his deft navigation of mythological and scientific relationships, he considers what can be salvaged from the Enlightenment. This European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries was concerned with ideas around God, reason, nature, and humanity.
Synthesised into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West, the Enlightenment instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy and politics that remain predominant as perceptions of truth and reality to this day. Central to the Enlightenment ‘truth,’ was the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe to improve their own condition.
Because the Enlightenment was, as cultural theorist Owain Jones (2008, p. 1601) suggests, “a vast body with great diversity and momentum”, its current destruction involves the “breaking of many things, over large tracts of thought, space and time”
Making interventions into that destruction is one of the ways in which de Fouw attempts to re-construct something from the wreckage, embedding what the nineteenth-century pragmatist William James articulated as a turning away from “from fixed principles, from closed systems.” (James 2000 [1907]:28) In other words, creativity, pluralism, and experimentalism are a more relevant means by which to understand the world as it emerges from the legacy of the Enlightenment.
Tales Of Hyperborea characterises the reason of science but weaves more ancient, polytheistic, mythological, and indigenous worldviews into it. There is always the implication of, or presence of, something uncanny or otherworldly in these sculptures – something attuned to the phenomenological as much as to the rational. de Fouw questions the tyranny of scientific hegemony as he invites many unlikely elements to coincide. This is what feminist theorist Donna Haraway calls the secular monotheism and the monocultures of ‘Big Energy and Big Capital’ (2016:160). Creating less oppositional categories and processes requires, she argues, a deeper entanglement with our animal, plant and human worlds. Making kin in these interspecies knots enables a more intertwined relationship, where modern, traditional, past, and present worlds become inextricably interconnected.
This approach is not so very different from the ways in which human and non-human entanglements were perceived in the Western psyche in the past and continue to be perceived amongst most indigenous communities today. Emma Wilby’s book on magic, shamanism and witchcraft in seventeenth century Scotland (Wilby 2010), for example, offers an analysis of the legal testimony of a young Scottish peasant called Isobel Gowdie, who was put on trial for witchcraft in 1662. In her confession, Gowdie revealed how she, along with her peasant neighbours, inhabited a reality that was profoundly influenced by the natural rhythms of the land, of the body, the transition of stars and planets across the sky and their impact on her fate. By 1662, Isobel Gowdie’s social superiors had, according to artist and cultural geographer Iain Biggs, largely ‘internalised a strictly dualistic Calvinism’ (2013).
However, Gowdie and her neighbours had not. Their world remained shaped by a multitude of uncertain conflicting forces. Their experience of living shares many similarities with the socio-political climate in which we find ourselves today, at least in its structural complexity and radical uncertainty.
This is evident in the heavy industrial aesthetic of de Fouw’s Fire Wall (2021) Triptych. Constructed from enormous wooden power/communications cable reels, these huge discs are carefully sanded in the centre, and treated with copper leaf. The title of this work invites many unlikely elements to coincide: a fire wall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing online network traffic, based on predetermined security rules. But the title alludes to more than just the pragmatic. The sculptures are immense; 2.5 metre industrial wooden discs take on the mythological stature of chariot wheels, or a medieval religious triptych, or, perhaps, the powerful shields used by the Valkyries on their journey to Valhalla. The shields becoming quite literally, a site of tension between us and the titanic forces of nature.
de Fouw presents us with the idea that we live in a time when things are slipping and loosening their grip on defined meanings and distinctions. Drawing inspiration from historical (and often heretical) figures in science as much as mythology and folklore, the sheer scale of Fire Wall (2021) invokes a hallucinatory quality, like the sort of mirages that might appear in extreme cold, or extreme heat – a hypothermic trick of the mind – what was that light? Where is it coming from? Is that a shield or a piece of industrial waste?
The burnt black holes through the copper leaf surfaces of Fire Wall (2021) refer to early drawings by Galileo of his sunspot observations. Sunspots are dark areas of irregular shape on the surface of the Sun. Galileo argued that these spots were, in fact, on the surface of the Sun or in its atmosphere, and although he could not say for certain `what they were, they appeared to him most like clouds. Today, scientists believe that the rotation of the sun causes distortions in the magnetic field. These distortions cause magnetic areas to break through the photosphere, resulting in what we see as sunspots. These disturbances on the surface of the sun emit vast explosions of electromagnetic energy and solar wind, which, when blown out into space, can end up in the crackling pinecones and dazzling lights of the aurora borealis.
In 1859, a solar flare associated with a geomagnetic storm was observed and recorded independently by British astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson. It became known as The Carrington Event and was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history. This surge of energy had a significant impact on earth at the time: strong displays of aurora lights were reported globally. Fires broke out in multiple telegraph systems and some telegraph operators received electric shocks.
Binary Stars (2021; Ghost Particle (2021); Written in the Stars (2021); Revolving Castle (Caer Cidi) 2022; Glyph and Glitch (2022) and Winds of Change II (2021) all refer to these magnetic field distortions, making visible those powerful bursts of energy in our universe. The photogram prints are made using iron filings and magnets, the orientation of which is captured on paper with a burst of light in the darkroom, creating snapshots of innumerable cosmic constellations.
These works also appear to explore language, referring to our ancient and fundamental need to communicate. The stellar symbols could evoke ancient glyphs found on palaeolithic stones, or examples of exploding binary code. de Fouw acknowledges the legacy of communication as an innate human desire here – but also its precarious existence, particularly when it comes to the storage of data. Although these works are rather beautiful, the overall feeling however, is chilling. The black and white explosions and bursts of energy draw attention to our human frailty and fragility. A Carrington-like event today could wreak havoc on power grids, satellites, data storage and communications systems, even wiping computer hard drives.
A key work that explores this idea is Here comes the Sun (2021) which is constructed using a late 19th century hand cranked telephone, within which a Moto Scope flick book type ‘GIF’ Viewer is installed. As the handle is turned, a looped animation of a massive sun flare shoots millions of miles into space. As the sun flare inside the telephone expands and contracts, it uses the same means of capturing movement in pre-cinema and animation, pioneered by the early photographic work of Muybridge in the late 19th century as he captured the movement of animals and humans using multiple stills cameras.
The telephone in which this sun flare animation is housed is the kind of mechanism that may have caught fire during the Carrington Event of 1859. Here comes the Sun (2021) therefore explores the power of the sun as both a creative and destructive force – with the ability to generate life and to take life away.
Tales Of Hyperborea makes no grand claims about the superiority of an experiential approach over an objective scientific approach and vice versa. de Fouw is more interested in their confluence and seepage, in finding a way to draw a connection between them. This is seen clearly in the mica waste covered cloak of Modern Promethean Bling Thing 2022) – which is made up of a fire blanket with thousands of pieces of mica industrial waste stitched into it. Traditionally used as stove glass, mica, as a material, has received poor publicity in recent years. Sourcing it is problematic and its extraction from the earth is known to be done in some instances by child labour in the developing world. It has also caused significant problems for homeowners in Donegal and Co. Mayo as an unintended ingredient in concrete blocks. Thousands of tons of mica go into cosmetics and metallic car paints every year.
Used in this sculpture in its raw state, it references the electrical industry – which uses mica to insulate high energy and high heat components. For all its faults, it is a beautiful and extremely delicate natural material that has the power to protect us from extreme electrical surges. In de Fouw’s sculpture it covers a cloak which glitters with a magical, celestial quality, alluding to the feathered cloak of the shaman or the myth of Icarus, who falls out of the sky, having flown too close to the Sun. However, the title of this piece may evoke the deeds of Prometheus as he stole the ‘Fire of the Gods’ from Mount Olympus, giving this to mankind, thereby bestowing him with ‘intellect’ and so the power of technology and ultimately dominion over nature.
Prometheus became a figure in the Western classical tradition who represented human striving (particularly the quest for scientific knowledge) and the risk of overreaching or of creating unintended consequences – something which resonates with the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves today.
Sunspots are monitored carefully today because of their potential to severely damage the communication systems upon which we rely, to seriously disrupt hard drives, data farms and surveillance systems – the breakdown of which would lead to a whole series of dystopian catastrophes in our contemporary world.
In bringing archaic belief systems into a contemporary art context through references to Prometheus, the Hyperboreoi, and the Valkyries, de Fouw invites us to consider a more dynamic and dialogical relationship with the earth. This interweaving of ancient and contemporary worldviews constitutes an example of what cultural theorist Declan Kiberd (2004) calls ‘the archaic avant-garde’. Kiberd (2004) used the phrase ‘archaic avant-garde’ to describe a way of rereading visual culture from the past in order to rewrite the present.
He applied the term initially to artworks and artefacts created in Ireland during the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century when motifs and symbols from ancient Ireland began to appear in arts and crafts as well as in industrial and architectural design. What began as an interest in ancient native culture by second-generation Anglo-Irish gentry and Victorian anthropologists later provided the visual tools to support a nationalist uprising.
While the first example of the presence of the archaic avant-garde in Ireland might be seen in the poetry and artwork of the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century, Kiberd also felt the term could be applied to contemporary society. This is because, he argued, the archaic avant-garde is a precursor to societal change and often manifests as new forms of creative practices that look to the past for inspiration during economic, social and, in our current time, environmental crises.
What is implicit in de Fouw’s work – and it is an idea that stems ultimately from Surrealism – is that all appearances are a kind of deception; there is no neutral, objective perception of reality. History shows us again and again that any claim to a superior truth always runs the risk of becoming a kind of tyranny – an attempt to assert order, authority, and control over that which is unknown and unknowable.
The way in which de Fouw layers diverse thoughts and ideas together is reminiscent of what author Virginia Woolf once referred to her “six little pocket knives” (Woolf and Woolf, 1942, p. 34). This was a metaphor for her many selves, which allowed her to empathise with and see from a perspective beyond her human form:
“I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L[eonard] to come & mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly ‘This is Earth Life.’ I seemed to see how earthy it all was, & I myself an evolved kind of hare… (Woolf cited in Lee, 1997, p. 379)”
de Fouw re-attaches value to the cosmic forces of this ‘Earth Life’, to give a voice to both science and mythology, to their entanglement and to the subjectivity of experiencing what the philosopher Guattari called a “global breath” (2012, p. 49). It is worth reflecting on why so many of us are drawn to both the mythology and the scientific discoveries of the arctic in recent years, and why it has taken such a strong hold in our imaginations – from the frozen lakes and cold cities of Scandi Noir films to the energy and beauty of the northern lights and the melting icebergs in the warming northern oceans.
The arctic is a terra incognita, a place where ancient myth and modern technology collide. During the Cold War for example, a huge defence system was installed around the arctic circle – particularly where Canada and Russia are near each other. These early warning systems for a nuclear attack are now obsolete, and, like palaeolithic monuments, colossal radar detection systems now stand decaying as ancient monuments in the snow.
The victory of light at the last day is not assumed in Norse mythology. It is the exception amongst European mythologies because it remains wholly possible in those minds used to the darkness of winter, that, in the days following the winter solstice, we might, after all, remain in darkness forever. The dark might still win the last battle, as Sara Maitland points out:
“The gods will go out to fight at Ragnarok. They will do their best for themselves, for humans, and for the light; but Baldur the Beautiful is dead and we do not know if they, or the forces of the dark will triumph. (2017: 214)”
In a pandemic and in a rapidly changing climate, we live in interesting times. Now, more than ever, we need the properties of both the dark and the light, to see it dancing over crackling pinecones so that we might be enraptured by, and entangled in, this vibrant, pulsating, material and, sometimes numinous universe.
Dr Ciara Healy Musson, December 2021.
Programme Director Art, Wexford Campus School of Art & Design IT Carlow.
