Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery: The Weight of Light: Art from the Edge of the World, Harriet Hellman and Charlie Binns

This exhibition ends on the 13th September 2026.

In 2024 both Charlie Binns and Harriet Hellman were part of the Arctic Circle Artists Residency Programme.  They circumnavigated Svalbard aboard the MV Ortelius.  The work in this exhibition is the result of their dialogue with the landscapes they encountered.

Charlie Binns is a photographer, sculpture and print maker who specialises in alternative techniques in photography.  Their part of the exhibition consisted of a number of photographs developed using salt water taken from the arctic.  The photographs were monochromatic and had a beautiful moody, dreamy quality.  I would like to have known a little more about the photographs.  There must have been stories attached to them, perspectives on the journey.  I think there is a part of me, as a scientist and lover of stories, that really wants photographs to come with that documentation of place.  As a collection though, this series felt a little eerie and sad.  There was a bleakness.

Harriet Hellman's pieces were ceramic sculptures in baffling organic shapes, that oozed texture.  It was easy to see that they had been inspired by all the many shapes of the ice.  They were incredibly complicated and it was difficult to see how such pieces could be made and then successfully fired.  I would love to have been able to look at the pieces from more angles and to touch them.

The arctic is somewhere so many of us will never go and it is lovely to see it through different artist's eyes.  The Arctic Circle Program gives artists, scientists, architects and educators an opportunity to visit the arctic circle.  Participants come from all over the world and so the program has directly contributed to many exhibitions around the world, inspiring many people who will likely never visit the arctic.

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