The Library of Ice - new publication

I'm delighted to announce that The Library of Ice, a memoir of my seven-year adventure in search of the world's disappearing ice, will be published this autumn by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster - and copies are now available to pre-order. Thank you to everyone who has accompanied me on these journeys, both in the Arctic and back home, especially those who assisted with my research over the last year. If you'd like to be kept informed about the launch event in November 2018, please email me: nancy@nancycampbell.co.uk

Autumn reading: printmaking and poetry in the north

For the last few months I've been absorbed in work on a new book, but even so there has been a little time for other things. I particularly enjoyed writing an article on the connections I find between kayaking and writing, published in the summer issue of Poetry News. Other work includes:

• A catalogue essay for Blue Hours, an exhibition to mark the close of Lucy May Schofield's year-long residency with Visual Arts in Rural Communities in Northumberland National Park. (Republished online in The Double Negative; image above: Khosro Adibi.)
• A review of the Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum in RA Magazine. 
• An interview with Scottish poet Macgillivray in Oxford Poetry magazine.
• An essay on my live lit project The Polar Tombola in The Blue Notebook: Journal of Artists' Books.
• Reviews of titles on book design by Carol Twombly and Jhumpa Lahiri in the Times Literary Supplement.

The highlight of the winter for me will be the Tove Jansson exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, opening on 25 October. I'm delighted to see Jansson accorded this honour, and look forward to a new perspective on her work.

Walking On Lava

I'm delighted to announce the arrival of Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times, a new paperback collection of essays, stories, poems, interviews and artwork taken from the first ten issues of Dark Mountain, which includes my essay on poetry and preservation in the Arctic, 'No More Words for Snow'.

Walking on Lava opens with the original Dark Mountain manifesto and should be the ideal introduction for new readers wanting to find their bearings in Dark Mountain territory. Meanwhile, for those who discovered the project in recent years, it offers the chance to get acquainted with some of the formative early contributions.

The book is edited by Charlotte Du Cann, Dougald Hine, Nick Hunt and Paul Kingsnorth – and published on both sides of the Atlantic by Chelsea Green.

Walking on Lava is available from all good bookshops and can be ordered direct from the Dark Mountain shop. Readers in the US may prefer to order direct from the publisher.

We'll be celebrating the official launch of Walking on Lava with an evening at the Old Truman Brewery in London on 5 September. This is a free event, but places are limited, so please register on the Eventbrite page.

Winter reading: Morris, Freud, Bacon & Co

• a review of The Book Beautiful: William Morris, Hilary Pepler and the Private Press Story at Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft for the Times Literary Supplement blog. 
• a review of a number of new books on the art of letters, including Letter Writing Among Poets (ed. Jonathan Ellis) and The Letters Page (ed. Jon McGregor) in the Times Literary Supplement (print edition out 26 January and online).  
• an introduction to the National Original Print Exhibition catalogue, for the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE), London. See illustration above, also accessible online.
• a pair of short catalogue essays on Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud for the exhibition Bacon / Freud: Selected Graphic Works at Marlborough Fine Art, London. Accessible online.
• an interview with artist Sue Ridge for a feature in Printmaking Today, looking at her prizewinning work Aphasia Wallpaper and its roots in the work and life of William Morris. (See illustration below.)
• a review of the catalogue for Degas: A Strange New Beauty, an exhibition of Degas' monotypes at MOMA, New York, in Printmaking Today.

Bacon / Freud at Marlborough Fine Art

It was a great pleasure to write about two titans of twentieth-century art for the catalogue to the current exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London. The different approaches to printmaking demonstrated by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud creates high drama in the gallery. Bacon and Freud: Selected Graphic Works is at Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, London until 25 February 2017. The catalogue (pictured below) can also be read online.

Disko Bay - news and reviews

• Recently The Poetry School invited me to write a guest post for their blog about a poem from Disko Bay, describing how it moved from first drafts to publication. My account of the writing process behind 'The Survivors' can be read here.

Some reviews of Disko Bay have been published in the last few weeks. Here's a selection:

• Theophilus Kwek considers the book in a round-up of titles nominated for the Forward Prizes (Felix Dennis Prize for First Collection) in The London Magazine: 'spare, supple lines serve as indispensable guides in the unfamiliar visual and mythic landscape'. (Read the full review here)

• Martyn Crucefix reviews my collection for his excellent poetry blog (well worth following for his forthcoming reviews of other books on the shortlist): 'eco-poetry without shed loads of landscape description'. (Read the full review here)

Many thanks to both poets for the time they have taken to read and respond to my work.

New book: Bill Jacklin Graphics

British artist Bill Jacklin RA is known for his 'urban portraits' of cities from Venice to Hong Kong, and of course New York - his home since the 1980s. This summer the artist returns to the city of his birth with an exhibition of paintings currently on show at Marlborough Fine Art in London. Meanwhile a retrospective at the Royal Academy (opens 3 June), charts Jacklin's printmaking career from the ground-breaking etchings of the 1960s to the dynamic monotypes of recent years. 

Bill Jacklin: Graphics, a new and authoritative collection of the artist's prints with an introduction by Jill Lloyd and an essay from me, is published by the Royal Academy to accompany the latter exhibition. 

On Saturday 4 June Bill Jacklin will discuss the ideas and techniques behind his work with me at an event organised by the Royal Academy. 

Photo of Bill Jacklin in his studio by Chris Craymer. See more of the shoot in Vanity Fair.

The Flaw

The Flaw is the April exhibition over at Fabelist, an online exhibition space curated by writer and art director Francesca Goodman.

The project arose from my study of the paintings of Emanuel A Pedersen in the collection of Ilulissat Kunstmuseum during a residency last summer. 'Flaw' was a term once used by whalers to describe the outer edge of the landfast ice; its relevance to Pedersen's work will be immediately apparent to viewers.

Also online, last week I was interviewed for The Herring's Tale, a new blog by journalist Bibi Christensen which sets out to explore Danish culture 'with a London twist'.

Spring reading: art writing

• an essay on the work of Yael Brotman in Scaffolding, the catalogue accompanying the artist's exhibition at Loop Gallery, Toronto
• a review of Nikolai Astrup: Painting Norway at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in the Times Literary Supplement
• a review of The Power of Paper: 50 Years of Printmaking in Australia, Canada and South Africa at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge (catalogue edited by Nicholas Thomas) in Printmaking Today
• I interviewed artist John Abell on his dramatic woodcuts created as part of a residency at Castell Coch, Wales, also for Printmaking Today (see below)

New book: Death of a Foster Son

I'm pleased to announce the publication of Death of a Foster Son, an investigation into the eerie correspondences between polar bears and their human counterparts. The essay, first published in Zoomorphic magazine last year, is now available as a limited edition pamphlet, hand-sewn and numbered. The design - in which close readers will notice clues to the narrative - is by Roni Gross.

Death of a Foster Son explores the uncanny point at which the lives of bears and humans meet. The text merges two Arctic stories: a contemporary encounter with a polar bear in Upernavik, Greenland, and a traditional Inuit folk tale 'The old woman who had a polar bear for a foster son'. The illustrations, cyanotype collages created during a residency at Ilulissat Kunstmuseum in Greenland, are based on traditional catch-share diagrams and clothing patterns.

More information and available to order here.

Photographs: Peter Abrahams / Lucid Plane

Sculptors in Print

Anish Kapoor, Fold III, 2014 Etching from two sheets, edition of 20, Each sheet 96.5 x 72.5 cm, Framed size 157 x 119.8 x 12.8 cm, courtesy the artist and Marlborough Graphics, London

The exhibition Sculptors in Print which opens at Marlborough Fine Art, London on 5 April will show iconic graphic works by Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra and Kiki Smith. I was honoured to be invited to write the essay for the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, which continues until 30 April.

Autumn reading: features, reviews and poems

• I reviewed Tricks of the Trade: Confessions of a Bookbinder by Jamie Kamph for the Times Literary Supplement
• I interviewed Finnish artist Kristian Krokfors for a feature in Printmaking Today to coincide with his major retrospective at Bukowski’s, Helsinki 
• I wrote about the artist Richard Long RA's new print series, The Spike Island Tapes, also in Printmaking Today
• My poems The night hunter, Summer song and Giving up on capitalism appeared in an issue of Moving Worlds (a journal of transcultural writings) dedicated to The Postcolonial Arctic.

Summer reading: new essays and reviews

Filming Ófærð

• I wrote about the experience of sharing a small Icelandic town with a film crew working on the Nordic Noir drama Ófærð ('Trapped') for the Times Literary Supplement ('Freelance', 19 June issue or available online to subscribers). 
• A feature on Emma Stibbon RA's drawings of polar ice (current exhibition at The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute) has been published on the Royal Academy Blog. (You can read a lengthier assessment of Stibbon's work over at The Island Review.)
• I reviewed Confessions of a Comma Queen, a riotous memoir by The New Yorker's copy editor Mary Norris, for Editing Matters the journal of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.
• A review of Printmaking on the Edge - the history of St Michael's print workshop in St John's, Newfoundland - is out in the summer issue of Printmaking Today. (Lovely book, available here.)

Essay: Death of a Foster Son

Death of a Foster Son, my essay about an encounter with a polar bear, has just been published in Zoomorphic magazine. You can read it here.  (Zoomorphic is a new venture, a magazine that promises 'writing in celebration and defence of wild animals' and the inaugural issue is full of good things.)

Terrain Nonfiction Prize

Sketch of snow crystal by René Descartes

The Library of Ice, my essay on ice cores and human readings of frozen water, has been awarded the Terrain Nonfiction Prize for 2014. The Library of Ice can be read online at Terrain.org. 

Sea Voyages in Contemporary Art

John Cumming Ditty Box (2011)

My review of the exhibition Voyage: sea journeys, island hopping and trans-oceanic concepts, curated by Imi Maufe and Rona Rangsch at Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany can now be read online in the Huffington Post. 

Voyage - New Exhibition in Germany

 

Next month sees the opening of Voyage: sea journeys, island hopping and trans-oceanic concepts curated by Imi Maufe and Rona Rangsch at Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany (which is, incidentally, a land-locked city). You can read a little more information about this exciting event here.

I'm currently at work on an essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition - more details to follow.