PassageIn May 1845, the English captain Sir John Franklin set out with two ships and a crew of 128 men on an expedition to establish the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean. Among the ships’ provisions was an ample supply of canned meat, enough to last them several years. The final European sighting of the ships was in August of that same year; none of the crew ever returned. The ensuing mystery of their disappearance occupied popular imagination in the United States and Great Britain for the latter half of the 19th Century, and sparked numerous voyages to locate the vanished ships. Subsequent explorers and surveyors unearthed well-preserved, frozen bodies as well as bevies of odd supplies. They also recorded the stories of the Inuit, who had encountered small bands of survivors, the last of whom were seen in 1851. Based on these stories, the routes the crew had embarked upon were nonsensical in direction and distance. This perplexing question—along with that of the strange gear the men chose to take with them after abandoning their ships—was perhaps finally answered in the 20th century, when forensic examinations revealed not only scurvy and starvation as causes of death, but also lead poisoning, the result of consuming the improperly canned meat.
Passage
The renowned Hudson School artist Frederick Church was among those fascinated by the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, to which he paid homage in his 1861 painting Icebergs. The broken mast of a ship in the lower left foreground is an elegiac nod to the doomed voyage. But his main subjects are the icebergs themselves, which he first sketched on his voyage to Newfoundland in 1859. The mast did not make its appearance in the painting until 1863, after its initial unveiling was met with tepid interest and no buyer. Ironically, the painting also disappeared. For decades, the only evidence of its existence was a chromolithograph, until 1979, when it was discovered on the third floor landing of a little-used stairwell in a children’s group home in Manchester. The house had once been the private country estate of Edwin William Watkin, an English railroad magnate who partially financed the construction of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental rail line, billed as the “Northwest Passage by land”. After its recovery, the painting was sold at auction for $2.5 million dollars and subsequently gifted to the Dallas Museum of Art.
Passage
Both Franklin and Church expected that the ice would yield to them. Franklin was searching for the places where the ice gave way to the forward momentum of an expanding world. Church attempted to wrap its sublime beauty in the romantic spectacle his audience craved. The artist Ellen Babcock, no less enthralled by the majesty of the glaciers—and fully aware of how the disappearing ice has come to herald our planet’s potential demise—wants instead to restore their distance from us, to re-establish the impossibility of comprehending them. She couples a photograph of an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland with a small watercolor of the same image. In both, a sheet of ice looms up on the left, dwarfing the ship cruising toward it, the Iceberg Quest II. The photograph is a record of her journey to see the icebergs off the Newfoundland coast while the watercolor holds the image apart from anything we might claim as experience. Her relationship with her audience stands firmly in the realm of representation. Babcock refrains from imbuing the work with irony, metaphor, or elegy. Her restraint is a reminder that there are limits of human intention and knowledge. She operates with things we know to allow the things we don’t know to remain remote. She erects a polystyrene iceberg that fills the room, and it is familiar to us, we instantly recognize the material from which it is made. But Babcock hold sus back from indulging in illusions of the Arctic’s mysteries or wonder. Sitting on the table next to the sculpture is a book with a photograph of the painting by Church. There in the image is the iceberg that she has modeled her sculpture upon. It is a reminder that so many layers exist between what lies off the coast of Newfoundland and our comprehension of it. Regardless of how close we stand, Babcock ensures that we feel the distance.
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Two sheets of insulating polystyrene hung together as a diptych, their protective coatings of blue plastic pulled up slightly from the bottom to create a low horizon. The wrinkles of the pulled fabric form ripples, like the wake of an unseen boat. Color and line create the sea and the heavens: a jewel-like blue, lapis lazuli, ultramarine. Above the water is a large and empty sky, unperturbed by the waves below. The wake points us forward; it is our passage. Passages are dependent upon movement. They exist only as a state between here and there. Dr. Russell Potter said that it is probably impossible to be as lost today as Franklin was, but there are still places in this world that we do not know. Way leads on to way, as Frost observed, the understanding that we could turn back, but don’t. We keep going until we no longer can.
PATRICIA MALONEY 2008
