About

Elizabeth Ogilvie’s Out of Ice was specially created for the subterranean spaces of Ambika P3, London, where the installation ran between 17 January and 9 February 2014.

The project now includes a film made with Rob Page (to be released in autumn 2017), and a major publication with Black Dog Publishing (available autumn 2017). Out of Ice—the book—includes essays focusing on critical interrogation of Ogilvie’s work, but also poetry, journal extracts and the artist’s own writing.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE 2014 EXHIBITION

Scottish environmental artist Elizabeth Ogilvie portrays the psychological, physical and poetic dimensions of ice and water in Out of Ice, a vast immersive installation specially created for the subterranean spaces of Ambika P3. Fusing art, architecture and science in an experiential installation comprising ice, water, video projections and film, Ogilvie’s dramatic large-scale work is a portal to the hidden extremes of our planet.

In the cool cavernous interior of Ambika P3, Out of Ice presents two expansive water pools into which sculptural ice forms slowly drip then eventually fall and break the still surfaces; huge panoramic real time video projections magnify the transitions from ice to water; luminous pieces of ice hang as if in mid-air; and a film projection of ice wall strata appears motionless with only an occasional snowflake drifting by.

Out of Ice is also Ogilvie’s homage to the indigenous people of the Far North. Four films made in collaboration with the Inuit of Northern Greenland reflect on their deep, sustaining relationship with ice and its significance in their cultural and intellectual identity.

Within the installation Ogilvie also explores the science of ice research in a film she has edited from footage shot by a NERC funded British Antarctic Survey expedition to Lake Ellsworth, an ancient sub-glacial lake.  As well as harbouring strange and unknown forms of life, the very deep lake contains the potential to provide a history of climate change on Earth going back thousands of millennia.

Out of Ice is also a narrative about the life of ice; its behavioural and familiar qualities, its role as an agent of evolution and how it acts as a global barometer of temperature, economic and social change.

Out of Ice travels to Contemporary Art Space Osaka [CASO], Japan in October 2014.  A former warehouse, CASO is one of Japan’s largest spaces for contemporary art on the waterfront area of Osaka harbour.

Ogilvie has additionally collaborated on Out of Ice, with the Universities of Aberdeen, Bristol and Edinburgh in the UK, and Metropolitan University in Denmark.

An Out of Ice DVD and publication with essays by Robert MacFarlane and others is available later in 2014. Details to be posted here.

To download the Exhibition Guide for Out of Ice click here >

 

The Private View for Out of Ice was sponsored by: