Ilana Halperin: What is Us and What is Earth
'Eldfell and I are the same age. In 2003 I turned 30 and visited Eldfell for the first time, celebrating our simultaneous appearance in 1973. The summer before I turned 30, my father was very sick. I planned the trip to Eldfell from my parents' bedroom. There was no clear-cut reason I wanted to go. It was an impulse. Landmass regeneration. Ten years later, I returned to Eldfell. Standing on the volcano, I thought about how we were almost 40. I wondered about returning to Eldfell when we both turned 50, 60 ... on. How, while we both share our lifetimes now, that will only continue for a certain amount of time, and then Eldfell will go from a human timescal 30 years old, 40 years old, to a geological timescale, 150, 1000, 800 million years old. I realised I had made a pact with Eldfell - a lifelong project exploring what it means to share your life with a volcano.
IIana Halperin, 20 Years with Eldfell (30-50), 2023
This book celebrates 25 years of the work of Ilana Halperin. Originally from New York and based in Glasgow in Scotland since 1998, Halperin makes drawings, text-drawings, watercolours, sculptures and photographs that seek to locate the personal in the geological, to collapse deep time and human time so that we can better understand ourselves in the natural world to which we belong.
The book brings together work made throughout Halperin's career, from Boiling Milk (Solfataras), 1999, an image of Halperin boiling milk in a geothermal pool in Iceland, to The Rock Cycle (from stromatolites to diamonds), 2026, new sculptures she has made that chart the life cycle of calcium carbonate rock in Scotland, France and New York. Writing by Paul Bonaventura, Catriona McAra with Claire Cousins, and Stephanie Straine sheds new light on Halperin's work and career, while a sequence of letters between Ilana Halperin and friends geographer Adam Bobbette and writer Candice Chung offer personal insight into the thought processes behind this intensely beguiling body of work.