Geoscience Reference
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and drawing until he was in his sixties. His landscapes writhe
and twirl under his dancing ballpoint pen, and are drawn from
his memory of places he had visited during his long life. Among
these were some of the volcanoes on Hawaii:
Crater Head, Maui
Provience [sic], Hawaii National Park
shows the volcano like a
pile of cream cakes, melting over one another in a manner not
unlike the cursive quality of some of Dieter Roth's drawings.
Certainly, Yoakum presents his volcano with the same delicious
affection with which Roth presents Surtsey.
A spectacular volcanic event took place in the United States
in the weeks before 18 May 1980 when, after a series of earth-
quakes of gradually increasing magnitude, the side of Mount St
Helens in Washington State blew off, creating devastation in
this sparsely inhabited part of the American wilderness. It would
be meaningless to quote the immense figures of the volume of
mud and lava spilled out (2.3 cubic km), or the strength of the
blast (27,000 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima), or the length of roads destroyed (480 km), or the
cost of the damage ($10,000 million) or the number of deaths
(57 people), or that the landslide, one of the largest in recorded
history, travelled at 240 km per hour (150 mph). Rather, we can
leave it to the British artist Michael Sandle (
b.
1936) whose series
of four large watercolour and ink drawings record the event,
which happened to take place on his 44th birthday.
Made from a series of aerial photographs, these works are
breathtaking in scale and substance, having the immediacy of a
series of freeze-frame film images that momentarily hold back
the inevitable sequence of the explosion. On the left of each
sheet is a moment from the explosion itself; on the right an
abstracted obliteration of each moment, cancelled by either a grey
abstracted blankness or a determined black diagonal stroke.³
These are part of a group of works that Sandle made in the
1980s that explore themes of devastation: a large diptych of 1984
is an image of the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor,
while other drawings and sculpture take the disasters and mem -
orials of twentieth century warfare as their theme. A volcanic
subject is unique in Sandle's art, but treating as he does with the
