When I am Laid in Earth. Mapping with a Pyrograph, the Melting Away of the Lewis Glacier on Mt. Kenya (2014)
In October 2014, Simon Norfolk spent eighteen days in a Kenyan mountain hut at a height of almost five thousand metres. His aim was to capture the melting away of the Lewis Glacier.
Thanks to periodic measurements taken of the glacier since 1934, Norfolk was able to chart the ice mass’s past borders on the present-day mountain. At night, Norfolk dragged an improvised torch over the ice mass’s outlines from previous moments in history. In doing so, he reveals the merciless melting, on a mountain that was once a volcano, by means of a fire fuelled by the same materials that harm the climate. In this work Norfolk mourns the rapid disappearance of a beauty that has existed for millennia whilst simultaneously bridging the gap between the human sense of time and the glacier’s timescale.
