In Spring of 2024, Reading Museum welcomed Arctic Mirage, a display of artwork by Reading-based artist Julian Grater inspired by his trips to the Arctic Circle. Encounters with people, animals and landscapes are indelibly recorded in a series of paintings, photographs and drawings that evoke our ideas about the Arctic, and encourage us to look at our own local landscapes in new ways.
As part of the exhibition, we were proud to host several events inviting creative responses to Grater's work by visitors to the museum. We've preserved those collaborations here as a testament to how viewing far-off landscapes can encourage us to look differently at our own surroundings and the natural landscapes of Reading.
We've titled this online exhibition 'Words and Music': the 'Words' are a series of poems created by attendees at Lesley Saunders' poetry workshop held in the Sir John Madejski gallery during the run of the Arctic Mirage exhibition. Attendees were encouraged to take inspiration from the exhibition, either individual works or the display as a whole, and write creatively based on what they took from it.
The 'Music' is a piece of experimental composition by Reading-based musician Peter Doyle in collaboration with students from Priors Court school. The students used instruments in their music room to create sounds and aural textures inspired by Arctic Mirage. Peter Doyle then took that music and created a live soundscape in the galleries, which is preserved as an audio clip below.
Additionally, we encourage you to explore the Arctic Mirage School Project 2024, a collection of artistic responses from St. John's Primary School's Year 4 students collected over several months.
Artistic practice is a process of borrowing, reworking, remixing and adapting. We hope that the artworks preserved here give a flavour of the experience of viewing Arctic Mirage at Reading Museum, and that they encourage you to create your own works of art inspired by landscapes, paintings, photography, or anything, really that catches your interest!
*Please note - our website's infrastructure was unable to contain a few of the poetic responses, and they have been added separately below. Make sure not to miss them!*
Words: Poetic Responses to Arctic Mirage
Ane Kathrine, Helena Marie
Outside the dark is endless, shadows me through the door
before the man shuts it out, beckons me to sit. The keening
wind quietens, like a dog dying on the ice. I am awkward,
make jokes – clothes on or off – he smiles lightly but his eyes
are a rebuke. The stove gives me solace, familiarity in this room
of men and foreign words. The Danish one is our go between.
He waits to translate: tell me about yourself, who are your
family, how do you feel about the melt? I say that I am
of this place, that its history has carved my face, the curve
of my ageing back, the claw of my rigid hand – that my father
knew nature in a way that is gone to youths, the boys who
long to leave or stay and spill their blood in desperation.
The artist works quickly, long strokes like my husband’s
fingers that lingered on me many years ago, then urgent,
and I turn my thoughts, think of the ways my world has
lost to the fracturing floes and whisky. We are in silence
now. He sees me as a sketch, not a woman, and I wonder
how I will be remade in charcoal, paper, ice.
Helena Marie
Desolation Point, Greenland (oil on canvas) by Julian Grater, 2015 , Gill Learner
Desolation Point, Greenland
(oil on canvas) by Julian Grater, 2015
Under grey-black water, a history of failures:
split spars, smashed masts, hulls shattered
when the freeze gripped.
So much sky, so little ice – a world dissolving;
monochrome except for the green heart of a berg
floating on what it was.
Here lie the vertebrae of seals, jaws of walruses,
ribs of whales flensed for the try-pots, blurred
by the silt of years.
Four months with no light except from a fitful moon:
the freeze holds, rebuilds. When the sun lifts,
the glaciers accelerate their slide.
Phalanges that carved scrimshaws grope
among skulls that swam with images of children, wives,
that warmed with dreams through endless nights.
Gill Learner
The Long Winter after 'Arctic Mirage' – an exhibition by Julian Grater , Jill Vance
The Long Winter
after 'Arctic Mirage' – an exhibition by Julian Grater
Greenland is a misnomer
for he never saw green.
No midnight sun,
always dusk to dark repeating.
He chose the cold,
to work white-dazzled,
the icescape almost undetectable
against sea or sky. Making it all seem
not quite real. Land, life:
a disembodiment. I am as orphaned
ice, disconnected, alien –
experiencing these vast empty tableaus.
In southern England, there's frost
and a forecast for light snow,
already I'm struggling in the chilly gloom,
how would I survive there.
Yet, his charcoals show some folks
find a way, become cryophiles.
Jill Vance
Iceland in mind after Julian Grater, Arctic Mirage, Exhibition at Reading Museum, 2024. Robin Thomas
Iceland in mind
after Julian Grater, Arctic Mirage, Exhibition at Reading Museum, 2024
Buses and street life,
a comfortable sitting room
with its looming TV, curtains
stirring, slouching to school,
the rock face of work,
the wet greenness of Spring,
faces at the door – welcome
and otherwise – happiness,
wine, despair, the sumptuousness
of cheesecake, children at play,
hedge cutters, Schubert,
the incessant barking of dogs
dissolve, as whiteness overwhelms.
Robin Thomas
ARCTIC MIRAGE, Mikhail Franklin
This is my latitude. I exist on this desolate, remote plane. Abhorring variety - with its constant kaleidoscope of choice, experiences and exchanges, I am drawn to Arctic. Remote, unmapped, forbidding. Merciless and indifferent to us. Above all silent.
It’s like the paper I write this on. Pure, white, tranquil. Poised for me to make the first move.
The vastness of Arctic thrills me as it chills me. By the time God looked to here He was tired of creation - green and vibrant - and left it white and barren.
Permanent. Once. We have changed that (as we change everything). Violating this virgin reserve starting gently but steadily increasing the torture until cracks appear.
Arctic. The last refuge. So old it is still in black and white, or their amalgam - grey. Neither landscape NOR ocean. Once water but solid and immutable. Just an unsettling flatness. A 2D world once unspoilt save by occasional tentative, hesitant footprints into a world that could erase you with these imprints leaving you preserved nice and fresh forever.
Forever now has an expiry date. This other world is now the last resource to be plundered. Arctic can now be used to keep us supplied comfy and cosy for a little bit longer. And so everywhere will get a little bit warmer. Arctic will get a little bit smaller, its buried treasures a little bit easier to find.
Arctic. It once inched its way almost to the tropics and back painfully slowly to sweep the world clean for the Age of Man. And our golden era will melt it away.
Take photos whilst you can.
Mikhail Franklin
Auction, Shakela Begum
Welcome to the land where sky meets ice,
where history lies unrecorded
and great cities rise and fall, like a chest in breathing.
An ancient land in the modern day
as alien as the moon.
Perhaps we ought to cast
our eyes down to Earth
to address what’s really going on,
for you’ve made it on time
for glacier is on the block:
A unique centrepiece for your home
bluer than the bluest blue.
A natural wonder for the living room –
going once, going twice
and it’s gone
Shakela Begum
Arctic Mirage, Susan Roberts
Warm drizzle in the street
on a midsummer morning.
Endless winter
in the air-cooled gallery:
snowy landscapes
where land and sea and sky
merge in shades of grey and white
with flashes of ice blue.
In the distance a small figure
appears to be walking away
disappearing into the mist
to offer words of hope
to a family frozen in grief.
Susan Roberts
‘Arctic Mirage', after an exhibition of images by Julian Grater, Gill Learner
This is a landscape without colour except for
the hearts of bergs: red light is absorbed
leaving only cobalt blue. Nor is there greenery
or any sign of growing things. There’s not a seal,
musk ox or polar bear to be seen. The sea jostles
pack-ice, moving sluggishly under its weight.
Few people are depicted in these frozen spaces:
a distant priest hurries to an unseen church
to lead prayers at a funeral; a man on a sled
is hauled by huskies. No sound but the hiss
and crackle of snow under sled-skis and the groan
of glaciers as they slither to extinction.
On sullen days, all is pallid – land blurs into sky:
there is no horizon. At such times, Inuit ancients
believed, the deceased can talk to us. The midnight sun
of death shines a cold light on the living. Despite
my need of brightness, warmth, I want to go there
to hear what my dead dear ones have to say.
Gill Learner
Silence, Inspired by ‘North Falls a Shadow’ and ‘Avatar: The last Airbender’, Atlas
The screaming sounds of anything but
Coherent speech. The howling wind
The cracking of the ice
The hissing sounds of vapour forming
I have yet to harness the heat
Escape is what I seek
Yet it is so far from reach
The end draws near, and yet time
Is of no consequence here
The hundred year war
brings with it fear
The world looks for a saviour
It looks to me to save them,
Maybe I like it here
Fire can’t touch me here
The world can end for all I care
Atlas
What is your name, Inspired by Portraits of the Inuit locals, Atlas
I shan’t judge you by the tint of your skin,
Or the wrinkles on your face, but by the intensity in your eyes
That look of sheer distrust that you clearly cannot disguise
You stare into space, but it seems like you are looking straight at me
Regarding what stands before you
I know that look,
I would recognise it anywhere ,
Anytime I brought back a report card from school,
Or anytime dishes would go missing cause they mysterious broke
Or coming back home from chasing dreams that refuse to be catch
Its disappointment, I know,
But I interpret it as disgust.
What else would you call it when all your hopes,
Are watered down by uncried tears
It’s a gooey mushy mess, Like snow when it rains
Like coals that stain a page, Or soot that blackens the heart
Atlas
Sublime Mind, after ‘Zombie Ice III’, Julian Grater, charcoal on paper, Christina Wallace
The ice is wounded.
In this white-scape, a black, foul scar etches into the cold. Jagged edges lightning scoring snow. One misstep and you will be hurled into the below. Down to grasping shadow. Blank ice.
Here, the horizon has cracked. A slit across the snow, a bloodstain. A cut that runs deep into the veins of frost. Splinters reaching outwards, gulfs that tempt you. Spider's web. Broken glass. An ever-staining mark just like that in your head.
You are wounded too.
Scratches in your scalp, screaming lines in your brain. But here it is different. In this beautiful awfulness: you feel clear. A blank page of vision. No words spiralling. No hypothetical terrors. No “bad feeling”. What can you worry about in the face of this?
There's no oven out on the ice, no hob to check. You couldn't burn to death here anyway. The arctic doesn't judge you, doesn't care about the thought explosions in your head, the constant battles. You are just another human speck blighting its horizon. Delicately balancing above frozen depths.
Do you even have the words to describe this place? Its solemn beauty. Its howling life. This white-out is a gift to you, one unknowingly given. Frantically taken.
A place of blissful nothingness. An “Arctic Mirage”. A contradiction. Islands in the sky. Mountain cities roaring in crags of ice.
This place is hurting. Barbed wire stabs packed ice, fissures. Volcano clouds stumble downwards, streaks of rain and tears. And in the cold silence, you hear the land moan. Glaciers shifting and melting ice out into the sea. Cries of desperation. Desolation. A want to be left alone.
Christina Wallace
Music: Thin Ice, by Peter Doyle and the students of Priors Court School
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