The amazement Lucy Cordes Engelman (1987) experienced as a child playing in the woods, is still at the heart of her work. Her dreamlike film and video installations are driven by her awe for nature. They propagate a holistic vision where humans are just a part of a larger, mysterious whole — always in relation to other factors.
For Become More Arctic (2023), Cordes Engelman travelled to the Arctic in search of a so-called ‘thin place’, a site where the boundaries between this world and the next have become blurry. According to the artist places like these can transport a person to a different state of being. From a little boat on a lake she filmed the arctic polar night, a time of year when the sun never fully rises and the sky changes from gold to pink to violet blue. The effects of this transformation are almost hallucinatory, with longing, melancholy, and transformation ultimately culminating in complete darkness.
Cordes Engelman also made recordings of a slow-moving glacier, which she approached as a living being, alternately growing and receding. Stressing the connection between humans and the wild, unspoilt natural world, this approach echoes traditional songs from the Scottish Hebrides about ice. Interested in forging a poetic relationship with the Arctic, Cordes Engelman wonders: “Is the arctic landscape a liminal space of continuous change? A place where you might become one with the continuous fluidity of the environment? Is it possible to become ‘more arctic’ by allowing the arctic landscape to affect us, in the same way we are, in turn, affecting it?”
Text: Esther Darley
Translation from Dutch to English: Marie Louise Schoondergang