Ayan Farah in conversation with Ilana Halperin

In the following conversation, Ayan Farah reflects on her residency and her practice in an exchange of letters with Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin.

Ilana included one of the works Ayan made when she visited Eldfell in Iceland in a recent exhibition she co-curated (another of these works, Eldfell, 2011, is part of the David and Indrė Roberts Collection), which marked the 50th anniversary of the volcano’s birth in 1973. Ilana has an ongoing relationship with the volcano, having been born the same year as its eruption, an anniversary she has celebrated through a wide-ranging body of work.

Both artists were included in the exhibition Flesh Arranges Itself Differently, co-curated by the Roberts Institute of Art and the Hunterian in 2022. Throughout their work and in this written conversation the artists explore loss, transformation, material and time in their practice.

26 September, 2023

Dear Ayan,

I am writing to you from my home in Glasgow where I have spent the afternoon preparing the room where I work for Autumn, and for our conversation about your time this past summer on the Roberts Institute of Art Residency in Scotland. I am just back from Heimaey – a small island off the Southern coast of Iceland which we both know in our own way, due to the emergence of the Eldfell volcano which was born in the middle of one freezing January night in 1973. There we had the pleasure of showing an early work of yours entitled Rare Earth, which is in part composed of material from Eldfell. The piece features in A Meeting with Eldfell, an exhibition which marks the 50th birthday of the volcano.

I thought we had never yet met in person*, and that we almost met in Glasgow as part of the exhibition Flesh Arranges Itself Differently, co-curated by the Roberts Institute of Art and The Hunterian in 2022. Early drawings of mine related to the Eldfell eruption were neighbours with your work. At the time Dominic Paterson, curator of Contemporary Art at The Hunterian, mentioned you had also made work about Eldfell. I can’t remember if Dominic told me you buried your sleeping bag at the foot of Eldfell for six months, or if I imagined that. So, to begin with – did you bury your sleeping bag deep into the lava from 1973? And if so, do you recall the inclination that led you to do it?

Picturing this gestural, performative action at the slopes of the volcano reminds me of a story about a work by artist Roman Signer that also took place in Iceland. He set up his tent in a canyon, then added a mic inside the tent, linked to speakers outside. As he slept, his snores rumbled across the canyon. In a visceral physical way, the body becomes the geologic act. Tectonic rumbling as plates move. Glaciers scraping the undersides of volcanic mountains… Your sleeping bag resting under lava at the foot of Eldfell is somehow quite an intimate act, it merges the domestic and the geologic in a very particular way. How do you think about the fluidity between these vocabularies?

It’s hard for me to write at the moment. When you reached out to see about a written conversation, I was still in Heimaey, preparing and installing the Eldfell exhibition. Out of my bedroom window I could see the sibling volcanoes of Eldfell and the elder volcano Helgafell. As you described in your text for the accompanying publication, ‘What was a roar of eruption in Eldfell has been replaced by a tranquil reality.’ We thought a lot about how for those of us from ‘off island’ and places far from Vestmannaeyjar, we could project what we needed to onto Eldfell and the story around its eruption. The terror of the evacuation in the middle of the night, homes devoured by lava and ash, the loss of everything you know, of objects, small family treasures, and even the view out of your garden – first there was an open arable field, and then it became a monster spewing lava and ash in the pitch-black night – this, in a sense, was abstract for us.

When I first went to Eldfell to mark both the volcanos and my 30th birthday in 2003, I knew I would soon be burying my father, and the not very subtle (though unconscious at the time) leap of drawing house after house buried by ash became one way of understanding the impending loss of my father, of mortality, and cycles of life between us and the Earth, a geologic intimacy of sorts. As we were both born in 1973, I felt some kind of deep comfort imagining sharing my life with a volcano the same age – that we could both be 30, 40, 50, on... I also felt profoundly inspired by the story of how people came together to save the island during the eruption – that they worked with rather than against nature to slow the lava flow, through pumping ocean water on it to cool it down, and ultimately save the harbour before it was sealed off by the eruption. Somehow when I see your work on Eldfell (and on) I simultaneously imagine ash and saltwater and new-born earth fusing in your hands, to become Rare Earth.

Sorry for this long digression, but – I come back to why it’s hard for me to write in certain ways just now. The earthquake in Morocco happened while I was still on Heimaey. One of my closest friends lives in the Medina in Marrakesh. She was not there when the earthquake hit, but her home, family, friends, dogs, her cat and birds, still were. She waited for days to hear if her house would be marked by a red X – demolish – or a yellow X – save. We spoke often, and then in the midst of this, my partner fell and fractured her shoulder and soon after, my beautiful dog who I have shared the last fifteen years of my life with, died. I would look out of the window, and see the volcanoes, still and quiet. Just in front of the volcanoes I faced the graveyard, where a famous photograph was taken of the arched entrance to the cemetery almost entirely covered by black ash, but somehow it survived. I guess it means I am writing from a place of thinking about loss, change, grief, deep, deep time, and how we are situated in it, how writing and making work about our relationship with this active Earth feels very different when it’s actually active.

I am thinking about your work, re-assembling and sewing, suturing complicated material and histories into a singular form. Bringing minerals, clay and soil from different places together to interact over time and settle into new ways of being. I wonder too if you learned to sew from your mother, as I learned to crochet from my mother who was a textile designer?

I read that during your residency with the Roberts Institute of Art in Scotland that you were gathering stones rich in iron (like our own blood), and clay from the roots of trees felled by a hurricane. And weaving, gathering scraps of fishing rope and plastic from the beach, seashells to make glaze. Can you tell me more about this? Each of these materials is somehow so active – clay unearthed in a hurricane – a record of a loud and violent event, that becomes transformed once you gather it – akin to the shift from volcanic event, to encountering a quiet mountain (which is not a mountain at all but a volcano)…

As soon we will begin work on a collaborative edition related to another volcano – the catastrophic eruption of Mount Pelee in 1903 –, different models of practice come to mind. 28,000 people died almost in an instant, in the pyroclastic eruption of that volcano. But, the story is even worse than that. There was a local election due to take place on the island, and though there were many indicators that the volcano was about to erupt, local politicians refused to let anyone evacuate, to keep them on the island for the vote. In the end, all of them – except for five people – died in the eruption. One survivor was imprisoned, saved by the thick walls of his cell. I think about this horrific event, and the needless death of so many, and then about the eruption of Eldfell – where everyone was evacuated off the island over one long night. There is much more here to discuss – but I come back to thinking about the deep and intrinsic humanity in your practice. Of paying attention to each scrap of fabric, giving something all the time it needs to age and change, of bringing things that normally would not live together into a kind of harmony that acknowledges the life of each part, on its own terms.

You asked me to enter into a conversation with you about your time in Scotland, and some of our shared and overlapping interests. Which I fully intended to do, but instead I want to tell you I found a beautiful crystal on the slopes of Eldfell on my 50th birthday, which as it turns out is also the 50th birthday of your sister. And to let you know – I have it for her – and look forward to passing it along to you, so that you can give your sister a sparkling mineral that is as old as she is.

*As you reminded me, in 2006 I took you and your friend Salomeh on a tour of the Glasgow School of Art! I have edges of memory around this, in peripheral vision – walking and talking as we wandered around the Barnes Building, and – did we (I hope) also go to the Mackintosh before it burned down?

13 October, 2023

Dear Ilana,

Thank you for taking the time to start on this conversation with me, I understand it has been a very eventful time on both personal and professional level, as an artist, those two are often very closely linked. I was saddened to hear about Eadie. I know we exchanged a quick message on Instagram just before your birthday (Happy Birthday again!) where I told you I can’t make it to Iceland because of work commitments and the difficulty of finding a pet sitter. You told me about leaving your elderly dog at home in Scotland. I then didn’t realise Eadie was in such a fragile state. I hope you still enjoyed your time in Heimaey, celebrating your birthday with Eldfell, something you have done a few times before.

I told my sister about the crystal you found in Eldfell, she asked me to thank you, then she asked if the eruption happened recently.

I now understand when we first met at Glasgow School of Art in 2006 that you must have been to Iceland recently, maybe for the first time to Eldfell. We briefly talked about geology and your background in New York, then years later at Camden Art Centre I found a small pamphlet about Eldfell that you’d written and illustrated so beautifully. The other day I found it again in an old box, it has survived all the moves I have made since.

Unlike you, I haven’t been back to Eldfell since 2010. I think my first visit was coincidental. I’m a very unnostalgic person and unless there is a practical reason or a fascination with a specific material, pigment or such, I tend to navigate what is next, researching further some new places and new ideas I have brought with me from the last destination. Just as the earth material I work with is constantly fleeting, it appears I’m constantly navigating new ground.

One reason for my lack of connection to a place is because I have moved around a lot. I was eight when my family left UAE for Sweden, by then I had already moved between Sharjah and Mogadishu several times. We didn’t bring much with us and the one box that held our most private possessions was lost in the move, everything we owned was newly acquired. Prior to this, my grandmother who used to sew, embroider and crochet all her bedding and who had a house full of fabric and handmade furniture lost the contents of her home when the war broke out in Somalia. My family had lost their belongings, their homes and their land they had from several generations back. I suppose this has had an effect on the way I make my work and the materials I use, there’s a need for it to be portable or local.

I ended up in Eldfell through a friend I met at art college in London, she has family connections to the island. Dominic’s description of my work Eldfell is correct, I buried a blanket that was held inside of my sleeping bag in the foot of Eldfell, it was later dug up by my friend. I didn’t bring any materials to Iceland, no art supplies and no intentions of making work. I think this was the start of a new type of work. I was exploring performance and old fashioned photographic techniques, working with sunlight on fabric and these new approaches to art making somehow merged the two. Parallel to this I had dug down another work along the seasonal Marodi Jeh river in Somaliland. I was looking at ancient Egyptian burial techniques and the relationship between cloth and earth pigments. I was also very fascinated by their worship of the sun, the god RA, ruler of earth, sky and the underworld. I find the crossover between how Muslims wrap and bury bodies and Egyptian mummification interesting and the use of certain earth pigments as signifiers in religion and myth. Eldfell is technically a burial site of sorts, a very sudden destructive force that turned into this beautiful landscape.

As you describe our relationship with this active earth, I come to think of my encounter with the aftermath of many previously active situations. On my first visit to rural Scotland I worked with the ash of a burned down forest. The fire was an accident that took out a third of the tree population of the island. Not long before I arrived at The Roberts Institute of Art Residency there had been a storm and many trees had fallen onto the local trails. That first week I found bees that appeared to be in distress, as I fed one honey water a new one with similar symptoms would fly in through the window. There was also this strange foam building up in the river outside, it became quite apparent there is a heavy use of pesticides on the local farms. I’m not sure if this has had any effect on the local pigments or the clay, nature sometimes appears to be a human construct. Collecting the clay from underneath the roots of the fallen trees was a way of finding it in its purest form, somehow it relates to the digging down of cloth in Eldfell, the constantly changing state of earth and its material and its continued sequence of existences.

I came to the residency with an idea of working with marine waste. I’m interested in its transformative potential, using techniques similar to the making of bone china to shape ceramic objects, I wanted to see if seashells could become porcelain. I have always engaged with materials and elements that have a certain charged history: salt, soil, oil, water… For this residency, I wanted to explore new materials and ways to transform agricultural waste. For instance, looking at locally grown hemp to make sculptures. It became apparent that hemp is a sensitive subject, not only is it heavily regulated by law, it’s also a very competitive field as the financial potential is huge.

I find myself constantly thinking of how transferable my practice is, is this something I can do anywhere? Can I find similar materials where I live? I’ve been thinking of the seashells for quite some time. Growing up there was this thing that Somalis don’t eat fish and seafood, they prefer lamb and poultry so most of it gets exported by foreigners and every so often looted by foreign fishing vessels; the thought of marine waste appeared to be a western concept. We know the reality is far more complex than that.

The work circulates these thoughts and ideas that relate to and question the human condition, placing myself in the core of all these different aspects of my research. The subjects remain universal.