Excerpts from the Library

Excerpts from the Library by Ilana Halperin was a new audio field guide designed to take you on a journey from Glasgow to the Isle of Bute. The field guide buildt on Halperin’s narrative performative lectures to tell a new story of love, lava, loss and the unexpected journeys that we now find ourselves on together.

It also marked the artist’s 20th anniversary of working on active volcanoes and features volcanic field diaries the artist has kept over the course of 20 years working on active, quiet and sleeping mountains. Listeners were invited to embark on a domestic geologic field excursion with the artist and contributors Andrew Patrizio and Veronica Geiger, which took us into Halperin’s solo exhibition There Is A Volcano Behind My House, currently on display at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute.

For over twenty years Halperin’s work explored the relationship between geology and daily life. Through drawing parallels between very personal events, for example when she was born or when her father died, and the birth of a volcano, she has allowed for a space to think about our place within the geological time continuum from a more intimate perspective.

To articulate a corporeal sense of geological time, she forms sculptures using natural geological processes, which change within our own life spans – from high-velocity calcifying springs in France to geothermal pools in Japan. Her hope is that through merging a more daily and geological sense of time, we may begin to understand ourselves as part of a deep time continuum. Her work deals with geological intimacy, vivacity, and the uncanny fact that something as apparently inert and certain as stone was once liquid, airborne, ash and alive.
-
Listeners were encouraged to experience the work whilst travelling, walking, working or engaging in other armchair expeditions. 
-
Commissioned in partnership with Mount Stuart Trust, with support from Creative Scotland

Excerpts from the Library was an online audio field guide commissioned by Patricia Fleming Gallery in partnership with Mount Stuart Trust.

Credits
Voices of Ilana Halperin, Andrew Patrizio & Veronica Geiger
Sound mix by Kaya Fraser
Mastering by John Harcus
Additional technical support by Charlotte Rogers
Design by After the News