Adventures

I was thrilled when the then art curator, John Stokes, contacted me about the planned exhibition "Adventures" at the Rheged Center. It was exciting to be invited as one of the participants in a fantastic group exhibition and to do so with my friend artist Mark Gibbs.

After the initial excitement died down, I started thinking about the theme of the exhibition. How would I relate to it, and how could my work be applied to the idea of adventure? I had done some work on two different contrasting projects that still had some things in common. My images from an expedition on the icebreaker Oden in the Gulf of Bothnia represented the big adventure, and the small private adventure was a collection of images from the forests of my home region in northern Sweden.

Oden is Sweden's largest icebreaker. She was launched in 1988 and was designed to assist winter navigation in the Gulf of Bothnia, but also to cope with Arctic ice conditions as a research vessel. In 1991, Oden became the first non-nuclear powered surface vessel to reach the North Pole. During the winter months, many icebreakers work to keep the sea routes open for traffic in the Gulf of Bothnia, both from Sweden and Finland, but none are as powerful as the icebreaker Oden.

For one week, I had the privilege of being on board with full access to the activities on board. This was not one of Oden's scientific expeditions. Instead, it was about what Oden was originally designed for: providing rapid assistance to ships stuck in the ice, assembling and leading convoys of freighters when conditions required it, and keeping the sea lanes as open as possible to traffic. The contrast between the powerful icebreaker in action and the silent white ice landscape is striking. After a while, it is easy to imagine that you are completely alone even though you are on board a ship with a full crew. In the bright daylight out on the ice, many seal colonies with newborn pups pass by on the ice. In the afternoon, as darkness falls, the chances of seeing the Northern Lights dance increase.