THE VISCOUS SHAPE
16mm archival film, sound
Skaftfell Art Center
Seyðisfjörður, Iceland
For fifteen years in the 1970s and ‘80s GPL Walker worked as Chair of the Volcanology Department at the University of Hawaii, where he intimately studied and photographed the pahoehoe and a’a lava flows incessantly overtaking the local roads and coral reefs of Maui. During fieldwork at Breiddalsettur Geology Center in East Iceland, Curtis Tamm & Hermione Spriggs reappropriated 16mm time lapses taken by Walker of one such flow destroying an inhabited area known as “Royal Gardens” over the course of an entire day. The almost invisible movements of the molten rock and lava are rendered lifelike and viscous in his time-condensed footage.
For the exhibition at Skaftfell Art Center Tamm & Spriggs showcased their developing fieldwork and film work developed at Breiddalsettur, along drawings produced by George for an unfinished manuscript, a project he was unable to complete before his death in 2005.
Known only as “The Book” in his archives, the writings feature ten chapters rigorously describing different types of flow which emanate from volcanic action; from tephra clouds, falling deposits, and underwater landslides, to a’a rubble and pahoehoe lava rivers. The artists gained unprecedented access to Walker’s unpublished manuscripts which clearly constitutes a key textbook on geological rheology (the study of flow). Their installation at Skaftfell pulls from Walker’s text to appropriate the flow-dynamics of lava itself as a “sorting mechanism” and filmic treatment of the archival material.
