Glasgow Climate Week 2026 - works by Ilana Halperin

Domestic Bliss presents works from Glasgow Museums’ collection reflecting on this building’s history as a former house, Royal Exchange and civic space. Some of themes within the show include domestic labour and feminism, public and private space and legacies of empire and slavery.

The opportunity through the Glasgow Climate Week 2026 highlighting the work of Ilana Halperin enables a conversation on the climate emergency, but also a space to think about human time in relation to deep geological time and acknowledge our impact on the world we inhabit briefly. It also gave me a chance to connect Ilana’s current work to earlier collection works that I had included in a show Drink in the Beauty from 2022. The title for that show came from a quote I found and noted below.

It is over 60 years since Rachel Carson wrote her ground-breaking work Silent Spring on the catastrophic and wide-ranging effects of the use of pesticides. This publication is often credited with advancing the global environmental movement and the 1994 edition had an introduction by former Vice President Al Gore. Re-reading it for this talk, his introduction feels as relevant now as it was then. Gore wrote about the backlash against her scientific research, the need to listen and respond to what science tells us, not the economic short-term gains.  But we are in a time after a pandemic has devastated lives worldwide, alongside a climate emergency and we are watching the gains made by historic COP meetings being turned back and deadlines missed or reneged on by politicians.

In Drink in the Beauty I also included this quote from Professor Mari Matsuda is an American lawyer, activist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. This quote is transcribed from her presentation at the American Studies Association Presidential Session: Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory, 2019 and further outlines the climate emergency that we are in but also the global injustices that are contributing to that.

As artists often do they observe, listen, research and distil key issues of our time like the climate emergency and our relationship with land and its histories – both geological and human, which brings me to Ilana Halperin.

Ilana Halperin is currently based between Glasgow and the Isle of Bute. She received her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and her BFA from Brown University and has several works in the collection including framed drawings, photographs, video work and this sound piece.

Put most simply her artwork explores the relationship between geology and daily life and thoughtfully connects us to the earth (and more recently further afield in space with her project about Mars) – but in thinking about earth its elements and its changes over time and thinking about its geology – deep time. She combines fieldwork in diverse locations – on volcanoes in Hawaii and Iceland, caves in France, geothermal springs in Japan – and in museums, archives and laboratories, with an active studio-based practice. Her work has featured in solo exhibitions world-wide including the show What is Us and What is Earth at Fruitmarket Gallery (27 February – 17 May 2026). Previous exhibitions include a solo show in Glasgow  - Minerals of New York at The Hunterian, Glasgow in 2019. Ilana has had residencies and exhibitions at the National Museum of Scotland, a residency 2014 – 17 in the Exploratorium in San Francisco to set up the Library of Earthly Anatomy which disrupts conventional classification methods to dissolve boundaries between nature and culture alongside animal, mineral and vegetable. If you read texts in her works or attend any of her lectures you find how she deftly weaves, the personal, the political and the historical with thinking around deep time, geology and the world we live in.

Turning to the work currently on display in Domestic Bliss at GoMA – Vatnajökull, the Farthest North – a sound work installed at the entrance to the exhibition. This recording captures the natural phenomenon of ice crystals melting in water and was made on the banks of an Icelandic lagoon at the foot of the glacier Vatnajökull. Capturing ideas of loss, change and impermanence, the work can be disconcerting as we only hear the sound, not the view the artist describes – ‘On the horizon, this event resembles sparkling cut glass from a chandelier floating in the sea’.

This is a sound work that is quite abstract in the space, and I was interested in the sound of something shattering, breaking up and not quite sure what it is. I think when you listen closely in the exhibition it does sound like it is natural and flowing.  I also like the fact that Halperin describes what she is seeing as very domestic, but the actual sound is located outside in nature.

The obvious relation to the climate emergency is in there that the barometer across the globe is melting glaciers, which Ilana captures here, but there are also more subtle references in her broader work. Recently she has been more vocal about the connections between humans, geology and the earth and our relationships with the places we are inhabiting only briefly.

“Over the last few years, as my work has grown and evolved, I feel even more deeply aware of the ways we are part of a deep time family which extends into the remote past and future – a calcium carbonate family tree stretching from stromatolites, fusulina and ammonites to mollusks, sirenians, starfish, coral and fish, to limestone, marble, our teeth and bones. Mountains and rocks, which remind us they are the product of the living, can become reanimated again, an infinite source of narratives, deeply embedded in our connected identities. As we are carbonate life forms, can looking more closely at our geologic neighbours, traces of former life that live in proximity, help us to connect in felt, material and corporeal ways to our place in the deep time story – help us to care about our deep time family? Ultimately, I really hope so.”

Ilana is interested in geology and how that relates to our bodies – both on a physical level, but also an emotional level. Often using a very nonlinear approach to time, her work draws parallels between very personal events and objective, natural forces, such as the birth of a volcano. In this way, her work creates a way for us to consider our place within the deep-time continuum using the more intimate perspective of human time scales. Her approach combines fieldwork in diverse locations and research in museums, archives, and laboratories with an active studio-based practice. Her work manifests in different media taking the form that the project requires. Collaborative approaches grow organically from the work itself and have led to unexpected fieldwork alongside volcanologists, wild caving with neuroscientists, work with geologists over the years and more recently working with petrifying springs in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes – where the Papon family have cared for these caves for seven generations. Here she has been creating new sculptures encrusted in limestone after leaving objects there for several months to a year or longer. More recently she has been working with geoscientist Dr Claire Cousins and art historian Dr Catriona McAra to observe extremophiles – life forms that can survive and exist in extreme environments. All returning to the earlier works exploring how minerals, animals, humans and vegetables are all connected.

This sound work is part of a body of work she created over 20 years in Iceland, some of which relates to her ongoing relationship with Eldfell, on the Icelandic island of Heimaey. These include drawings of building covered by lava and ash by the eruption in 1973, the same year the artist was born. She has continued to visit the work on her 30^th, 40^th and 50^th birthdays – their mutual celebrations forming a body of work developing over time – some of which are shown within the Fruitmarket show. Other works remind us of our place in geological time and two from the Drink in the Beauty show in 2002 are Krafla volcano fissure row and later that same day 2003 Both are photographs taken by the artist and printed onto aluminum. The two photographs are inspired by Timothy O’Sullivan’s photograph Fissure Vent at Steamboat Springs, Nevada 1867 which was on display in the Met Museum, New York, which she visited as a child.  Krafla volcano fissure row documents a recent fissure in Iceland sits at the meeting point between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. The figure in the distance reminds us of our presence in geological time. Shown together with later that same day , the absence of the figure in this second photograph references time passing and renewal. The artist was also interested in the fissure between the two tectonic plates. She sees it as a space of hopeful possibility that is not dictated by the politics of landownership or international borders.

The third photograph I included in that show shows a place closer to GoMA. We don’t usually think of natural phenomena existing within cities, but they are there. In Victoria Park 2003, the artist photographed herself resting in Fossil Grove - a 330-million-year-old geological wonder within Glasgow - here long before we were. Ilana Halperin has worked with Fossil Grove on several occasions and used to live round the corner from Victoria Park. For her discovery of such a geological wonder near where she was living was a game changer for her in thinking about her relationship with the city and impressed on her the idea of deep geological time being a city encounter not an archeological dig somewhere else. 

So, while Halperin’s work does not fall into the realms of climate emergency activism it does, like several other artists in our collection, consider this and bring ideas and provocations to a wide audience. Through her work she captures and distil moments in time through their work. The quiet and everyday act of being present in landscapes can become extraordinary and we are reminded of the geological time it has taken to create what is around us and how quickly we are destroying it.