Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule was first presented in a major solo exhibition at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, in 2008. The exhibition has subsequently toured to a number of national and international venues and has been viewed by an audience of c.20,000. A number of events and public lectures accompanied the exhibition at each venue. This included a collaborative presentation with the National Media Museum that examined the relationship between historical photographs from the NMM archive and the Ultima Thule exhibition.

Ultima Thule is the result of an on-going, inter-disciplinary research enquiry that involves the processing of historical, scientific and cultural knowledge through a creative photographic art practice that is informed by other histories of landscape representation (in the visual arts, literature, cartography etc). The series was made in Iceland, at the boundary between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates – a divergent boundary that features a continuous, and occasionally explosive, process of volcanic activity and the creation of some of the newest surfaces on Earth. The series uses photography to describe the geological processes of this region, within the context of human histories of exploration.
The production of the photographic works involved a number of solo photographic expeditions in Iceland. It was also informed by an inter-disciplinary expedition with an international group of volcanologists and earth scientists from IAVCEI (International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior) to the Grimsvotn volcano (in the Vatnajokull Glacier) in 2008, to observe ice-volcano interaction.