Ilana Halperin: Nomadic Landmass
Until June 25; doggerfisher, Edinburgh

In Portobello, 1856, Hugh Miller put a gun to his chest and pulled the trigger. Nobody really knows why, but the prominent geologist and Free Church apologist had struggled for years to reconcile his religious beliefs with his scientific ones. The stones of Scotland suggested to him that the world had taken far longer than seven days to come into being.

Three years later, Aberdeen-born painter William Dyce painted a work full of brooding intensity. Pegwell Bay: A Recollection Of October 5th 1858 depicts an exact moment of time, as three different kinds of time collide. Up in the sky, a comet drops through space. In the background, the detailed strata of white cliffs tell of geological time, and in the foreground Dyce’s family, so dear to him, are little more than passing specks on the world’s vast timeline.

It’s against this background that Ilana Halperin’s exhibition, Nomadic Landmass, should be viewed. The New-York born, Glasgow-based artist has spent much time where those two tectonic plates meet, in Iceland. For her 30th birthday she chose to visit a mountain which shared her birthday: Eldfell was formed after a surprise volcanic eruption in 1973.

Her exhibition contains much in the way of anecdotal evidence of her trip, a form of intimate visual diary displayed in the manner of Victorian explorers. There are photographs taken from the aeroplane, specimens of quartz in glass cases, and an interview with a fellow explorer who has since met her death on route to the North Pole.

A pencil-drawn timeline makes Halperin’s motivations explicit: it draws together different perceptions of time, just like Dyce did, setting her father’s premature death against the enormity of geological time. Others die on the timeline too, and yet, comfortingly, a mountain is also born.

Dyce could have displayed this kind of information too, if he had been so inclined, but there was no need; his painting said everything he needed it to. The same goes for Halperin; the strength of her exhibition is in the fine drawings, which speak for themselves. Like Dyce’s painting, these exquisite diamonds are a window on Halperin’s desire to set her own transience against the reassuring stability of geology.

In ordinary pencil on ordinary paper, Halperin traces the contours of every pebble until the repeating patterns become worthy of Gustav Klimt. The striations of rock and dried up lava are pencilled with meticulous care, in pseudo-scientific markings reminiscent of morse code, or a geological text book. Moss, scree, grass and stone are fixed in time, as a girl and a mountain turn 30 together.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 15.05.05