The Shifting Furnace - Volcano: Nature and Culture - page 159

result of overpowering force the Mount St Helens series is in step
with his melancholy bronze catafalques such as The End of the
Third Reich (1980) and his violent A Mighty Blow for Freedom
(Fuck the Media) (1988).
A few years after Surtsey had appeared out of the sea off
Iceland, another significant eruption occurred on the island of
Heimaey in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago of which Surtsey
had become part. In January 1973 an earthquake shower shook
the island, and fissures began to run across it, spewing out ash,
steam and lava. This deteriorated and within days a new moun-
tain - later named Eldfell (Mountain of Fire) - began to form,
rising to about 200 metres after three weeks. Keith Grant ( b.
1930), an artist who had always been attracted to the pictorial
allure of extreme environments, flew over Heimaey in 1973 when
the column of smoke and ash was still ascending. At 6,000
metres (20,000 feet) he found a perspective on the eruption that
prefigures that taken by Michael Sandle's source photographs,
and one that is unique to the twentieth century, when aerial
viewpoints became possible. This would not be a perspective
likely to be taken advantage of by any nineteenth-century artist,
raised aloft in a gas balloon. Grant's starkly vertical and compel-
lingly beautiful eruption column, echoing like Gudmundur
Einarsson's Grimsvotn the form of a nuclear mushroom cloud, is
the central feature of the painting. It echoes also the articulation
of the human figure, the lower half of the body running out up
and away from the crater.
Keith Grant has made a group of paintings of volcanoes,
most of which originate from Iceland. The crisp cold of the far
north - its emptiness, the stark crystalline forms, the limpid
blues and wide even limitless horizons - attracted Grant away
from tranquil temperate landscapes. Seen in contrast with his
paintings of equatorial subjects in Africa and South America that
pulse with colour and heat, Grant's Iceland volcanoes project a
sense of control and chill detachment that counteracts the chaos
and disorder of their subject matter.
Ilana Halperin ( b. 1973) noticed, when she turned 30 in 2003,
that Eldfell too was 30 years old. To mark this joint birthday

Michael Sandle, Mount
St Helens, Version iii and
iv , 1981-2, watercolour.