Halperin, Ilana, RSA
b. 1973
Halperin was born in New York in 1973, and is currently is based between Glasgow and the Isle of Bute.
She received her BFA from Brown University in 1995 and her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2000.
Since 1993 she has been the recipient of numerous Awards and Residencies and has exhibited widely internationally in both group and solo exhibitions since 1997.
She was elected RSA at an Assembly on 27 September 2017.
Halperin has served as a Board member of Dundee Contemporary Arts.
There are recurring core concerns within her work including intergenerational geologic family and expansive notions of deep time and these are explored in her RSA Diploma Collection deposit which combines two discrete but inter-related works, the drawing 'Learning to Read Rocks III' and the assemblage of found objects 'From Coral to Marble.'
Halperin explains her art practice thus; "For over twenty years my work has explored the relationship between geology and daily life. Through drawing parallels between very personal events, for example when I was born or when my father died, with the birth of a volcano, has allowed for a space to think about our place within the geological time continuum from a more intimate perspective. To articulate a corporeal sense of geological time, I form sculptures using natural geological processes, which change within our own lifespans – from high velocity calcifying springs in France to geothermal pools in Japan. My hope is that through merging a more daily and geological sense of time, we may begin to understand ourselves as part of a deep time continuum. My work deals with geological intimacy, vivacity, and the uncanny fact that something as apparently inert and certain as stone was once liquid, airborne, ash and alive."
