It’s mid-September and I’m dead excited and it’s not because I’m a year closer to turning forty!
In fact, there’s several motives behind my bubbling enthusiasm as our train approaches Kings Cross. We’re here to attend the British Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards and I’m one of the lucky winners having won the Habitat category.
But even the remarkable, unexpected honour of this award is slightly eclipsed by the fact I get to spend the day with my favourite person enjoying coffee, art, cake and walks along my beloved South Bank; just like we used to. It was stunning and intoxicating.
The real winner of the day however was exploring the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at Tate Modern. This was, is the best thing I’ve visited in an age! An Ice Age even…
Visiting this unique, thought provoking and long-impacting exhibition reminded me that I’d actually seen Eliasson’s initial, but seperate, installation here last year. This was when he placed a number of icebergs from Greenland on the banks of the Thames in front of Tate Modern.
The icebergs, made of compacted snow, were left to gradually melt away. These compressed snow blocks contained trapped air from a time long before industry and urbanisation.
It really was an sensational piece of artwork to experience. Made all the more siginificant in the knowledge that as these ice blocks released their ancient air into this epic city, another 10,000 blocks of ice just like these dissolve in our seas every second… Ten, thousand, blocks of ice, every second.
