The Big Freeze
Last Thursday saw the launch of the inaugural Big Freeze Art Festival which is being organised and run by Charlotte Connelly, museum curator at The Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge. Twenty-five artists are taking part in the festival, which offers a hugely diverse and interesting programme including contributions from BAS geologists, poets, graphic artists, wildlife artists, sound artists, sculptors and painters and culminates on the last day with a screening of three Inuit films, released in partnership with The Native Spirit Foundation. Contributions from the public also feature in The Polar Self Portraits Project curated by artist Zsuzsanna Ardó and fabulous collaborators from as far afield as Tokyo and Iran show just how connected we all are when it comes to appreciating and recognising the importance of the polar regions both intimately and globally.
I feel very lucky to have been asked to take part and am especially happy to be reconnecting and hearing from some of the other past Friends of SPRI Artists in Residence. Our journeys north and south may be separated in time and we may be scattered geographically across the UK, but we share such a profound experience, having all had the honour of travelling to the polar regions with SPRI, to observe, absorb and create. It’s been a long time since I saw some of them in person and although it would have been wonderful to have had the festival staged in person at the Institute, Charlotte has done an incredible job making all the content available on digital platforms via SPRI’s website and their YouTube Channel as well as hosting live events via Crowdcast. One of the enormous benefits of this digital directory is that I’ve been able to spend the past couple days catching up with events I missed earlier in the week.
The Big Freeze | Lucy Carty - An Introduction to Encaustic Painting
My own contributions include work from Death of a Landscape which is featured in the online festival exhibition and I also created a short video to show some of the ways I use encaustic in my work. I can get quite tongue-tied and nervous talking about my work off the cuff, so I enjoyed the opportunity of making a video and found it quite cathartic, despite having to learn a lot of new skills from scratch. The whole creative journey, from delving into old footage and images and revisiting old work, through to creating new content, learning new software and weaving a bit of a story has been incredibly rewarding.
If the video inspires you to try out encaustic painting yourself or if you’d simply like to find out more about the techniques, a great place to start would be the website for R&F Handmade Paints. They produce the most beautiful quality encaustic paints and oil pigment sticks and their site is a wealth of incredibly generous and useful information. Also, check out the new edition of Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch’s book ‘Encaustic Workshop’. A perfect introduction.
