David Buckland
Since 2003, the project has taken eight groups to the Arctic in a
100-year-old schooner, with participants including singers Jarvis Cocker and KT Tunstall, and comedian Marcus Brigstocke. He talks
to Olivia Edward about what art can say that science can’t.
If you go back to the 1800s, every research expedition had an artist on board. It has always been my lament that, somewhere in the early 1900s, science and the arts went on separate paths. One of the best outcomes of climate change is that it has brought science and the arts back together again.
More than a decade ago, while I was working as an artist, I met some oceanographers in Southampton. To them, climate change was a total reality but, despite this knowledge, they just couldn’t engage the public. Their language is data and graphs and that’s not a language in which the general public is fluent. I set up Cape Farewell with the ambition of creating a completely different way of talking about climate change.
Initially, the scientists were a bit bewildered. They thought that maybe the artists would simply illustrate their data, but they soon realised that people such as [author] Ian McEwan and [sculptor] Antony Gormley don’t do illustrations. Instead, they tend to bleed the scientists dry and then find another way of putting the data out there. Artists can offer a way of thinking about a subject that people might never have thought of before.
I extend an open invitation to the artists. They don’t have to agree that they will produce something. You can’t contract art. Ian McEwan, who came with us to the Arctic in 2005, took two years. He said, ‘I can’t find a way of turning this into a novel. I can’t find the structure.’ But then he found a really brilliant way of doing it in his novel Solar, which deals with the science and technology of alternative energy sources. That sort of thing has happened so many times.
People may question whether art with an agenda is really art, but I believe you can make great art that is about something. Look at Picasso’s Guernica, or the Four Quartets, which was about the complex place civilisation was in when TS Eliot wrote it. Art can have something to say. But it has to be true and you mustn’t preach; that’s the first rule of Cape Farewell.
To respond to climate change on a global scale, we need a global shift in behaviour. We have to move away from an over-consuming lifestyle towards a more sustainable one. In order to do that, we need to question what a human being requires to create a really fruitful and stimulating life. That’s right in the middle of artistic territory. Artists are dealing with the social and cultural significance of how we live and think all the time.
By shifting the climate change debate into a cultural debate, we’ve put it out of reach of the oil industry’s disinformation service. These people are spending their time undermining individual scientific facts that need to be seen within the context of 500 other facts. And when they’ve discredited that one fact, they tell everyone climate change doesn’t exist. But we’re moving things into the cultural sector, and it’s very difficult for the highly financed disinformation service to attack us there.
Cape Farewell always follows the science. Every expedition, whether it’s to the Arctic or the Andes, is based on scientific research. We’ve carried out lots of good basic research and we have the two most northerly Argo floats. There are about 3,000 of them in the world’s oceans. They’re programmed to sink to a depth of about four kilometres, stay there for 20 days, then rise to the surface and beam the information they’ve recorded about water salinity and temperature back via satellite before they sink again. They’re very sophisticated and essential for oceanographers to understand what’s happening to the oceans.
Our most recent expedition went to the Russian Arctic, right up into the ice, east of Spitsbergen. There’s nothing like being up there. It’s an extraordinary place – dangerous and cold, but also really physically invigorating. It makes you feel alive, inspired, visionary. I don’t know whether it’s because of the lack of people or the purity of the air, but it’s really magical.
I think the next 20 years are going to be a time of fascinating cultural change. I don’t think it’s going to be very pretty – I think we’re going to go through some rough times – but I think the change in society worldwide is going to be phenomenal and very exciting. And if you get change on that scale, then you will always find artists and scientists working there. And that’s where they should be – right on the cusp of that change.
Curriculum vitae
1949 Born in Paddington, London
1970 Graduated from London College of Printing
1972 First solo exhibition at Northern Arts, Newcastle
1977, 1987 Solo exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery, London
2001 The Cape Farewell Project is set up
2003 Cape Farewell takes its first group to the Arctic
2009 Cape Farewell leads a group to the Peruvian Andes, its first expedition outside of the Arctic
If you go back to the 1800s, every research expedition had an artist on board. It has always been my lament that, somewhere in the early 1900s, science and the arts went on separate paths. One of the best outcomes of climate change is that it has brought science and the arts back together again.
More than a decade ago, while I was working as an artist, I met some oceanographers in Southampton. To them, climate change was a total reality but, despite this knowledge, they just couldn’t engage the public. Their language is data and graphs and that’s not a language in which the general public is fluent. I set up Cape Farewell with the ambition of creating a completely different way of talking about climate change.
Initially, the scientists were a bit bewildered. They thought that maybe the artists would simply illustrate their data, but they soon realised that people such as [author] Ian McEwan and [sculptor] Antony Gormley don’t do illustrations. Instead, they tend to bleed the scientists dry and then find another way of putting the data out there. Artists can offer a way of thinking about a subject that people might never have thought of before.
I extend an open invitation to the artists. They don’t have to agree that they will produce something. You can’t contract art. Ian McEwan, who came with us to the Arctic in 2005, took two years. He said, ‘I can’t find a way of turning this into a novel. I can’t find the structure.’ But then he found a really brilliant way of doing it in his novel Solar, which deals with the science and technology of alternative energy sources. That sort of thing has happened so many times.
People may question whether art with an agenda is really art, but I believe you can make great art that is about something. Look at Picasso’s Guernica, or the Four Quartets, which was about the complex place civilisation was in when TS Eliot wrote it. Art can have something to say. But it has to be true and you mustn’t preach; that’s the first rule of Cape Farewell.
To respond to climate change on a global scale, we need a global shift in behaviour. We have to move away from an over-consuming lifestyle towards a more sustainable one. In order to do that, we need to question what a human being requires to create a really fruitful and stimulating life. That’s right in the middle of artistic territory. Artists are dealing with the social and cultural significance of how we live and think all the time.
By shifting the climate change debate into a cultural debate, we’ve put it out of reach of the oil industry’s disinformation service. These people are spending their time undermining individual scientific facts that need to be seen within the context of 500 other facts. And when they’ve discredited that one fact, they tell everyone climate change doesn’t exist. But we’re moving things into the cultural sector, and it’s very difficult for the highly financed disinformation service to attack us there.
Cape Farewell always follows the science. Every expedition, whether it’s to the Arctic or the Andes, is based on scientific research. We’ve carried out lots of good basic research and we have the two most northerly Argo floats. There are about 3,000 of them in the world’s oceans. They’re programmed to sink to a depth of about four kilometres, stay there for 20 days, then rise to the surface and beam the information they’ve recorded about water salinity and temperature back via satellite before they sink again. They’re very sophisticated and essential for oceanographers to understand what’s happening to the oceans.
Our most recent expedition went to the Russian Arctic, right up into the ice, east of Spitsbergen. There’s nothing like being up there. It’s an extraordinary place – dangerous and cold, but also really physically invigorating. It makes you feel alive, inspired, visionary. I don’t know whether it’s because of the lack of people or the purity of the air, but it’s really magical.
I think the next 20 years are going to be a time of fascinating cultural change. I don’t think it’s going to be very pretty – I think we’re going to go through some rough times – but I think the change in society worldwide is going to be phenomenal and very exciting. And if you get change on that scale, then you will always find artists and scientists working there. And that’s where they should be – right on the cusp of that change.
Curriculum vitae
1949 Born in Paddington, London
1970 Graduated from London College of Printing
1972 First solo exhibition at Northern Arts, Newcastle
1977, 1987 Solo exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery, London
2001 The Cape Farewell Project is set up
2003 Cape Farewell takes its first group to the Arctic
2009 Cape Farewell leads a group to the Peruvian Andes, its first expedition outside of the Arctic
