Today I woke to the news that because our elected elite are carefully looking the other way after an illegal invasion to expunge a despot, the great white wonder feels there’s now a green flag on taking Greenland.
As a world citizen and environmentalist I’d be appalled anyway, but I’m grieving because I was once lucky enough to live there. I know Greenland, its people, its art and culture, and its truly magnificent landscape.
Greenland was where I first ever taught English.
I lived there for 8 weeks, and in that time met no other first-language English speakers. Greenlandic is such a different language there were times that I was speaking in my hastily learned Danish to people who were replying in their little English, and we got by. With lots of hand gestures, we got by.
I lived there for 8 weeks, flying out in September when the price of the plane tickets dropped from insane to affordable, without knowing that the tourist infrastructure closed down that week for the winter (it wasn’t pre-internet, just before helpful people filled it with helpful (and other) tips).
I’d tried to be organised. I’d been to the library to research, but the books I’d found were all seafaring accounts of surviving getting trapped in sea ice. I’d found myself a Danish teacher who did her best with me, off and on for 3 months, as I hurriedly worked all kinds of hospitality jobs to scrape a travel fund together.
I could tell you many stories about how naive a traveller I was.
After I tell people that I took my tent and sleeping bag because I had less than £550 after I’d paid for my flights, they laugh.
When I tell them that I also took my bulky art school portfolio with me (and not a camping mattress), they are normally in stitches.
Yes, I did sleep across my open portfolio, and yes, it was very, very cold.
I was a solo traveller with an art portfolio because when I was in my final year at art school I had been nominated for a Carnegie travel scholarship. There were 5 nominees, and we all had to write an essay saying where we wanted to go and why.
My creative work was always about putting contemporary art into the community unannounced, and in unexpected ways. I really wanted to try this in a non-western and isolated community. I wanted to see if art made sense there, or the same sense there, or if it was just so bolstered by Westernness that it would be meaningless. I picked Greenland because I was drawn to its landscape. I knew almost nothing about its creative culture, but as an artist I’d dug up fields with a digger, floated prisms of art down rivers, placed sculptures in the sea and burned rings into hillsides (I understand and protect the environment better now). I hungered for the combination of a dramatic, unfamiliar landscape and a culture unconditioned by modern art.
During my time there I put on an exhibition of 32 Scottish artworks. It all arrived by post and I diligently set it up and photographed it in various community settings.
The English teaching happened because a very kind woman grew increasingly worried about me in my tent, and kindly offered a bed in her home. When I first arrived they were eating reindeer heart, which I devoured too, because I was at this point very weary of baked beans. I’m not sure if she intended me to stay for just the night, but as I repaid her by at first teaching her daughter English and drawing, then a good handful of the village children, who soon followed me around on a daily basis and truly loved all the art I was sharing with them. In exchange, they shared their paths through their local landscape and I saw it through their eyes.
I didn’t go home with many great art conclusions other than the artworks looked as wonderful there as anywhere. Some of it didn’t translate. Some of it enchanted. I went home humbled by kindness, by open-hearted children, and by the northern lights I often stood under, for the 3 minutes I could bear before it got too cold.
I went home as an initiated traveller who will always help someone on their mission. I’ve taken in many strangers to repay my host’s generosity. I truly regret not staying in touch with the family I shared no common language with. (I sent cards for a few years, but tailed off).
I’ll add images to this article next time I’m in my loft. All the photos are up there somewhere.
Dortiit, my creative beauty, if you somehow ever get to read this, I have never forgotten you.
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