The Italian Institute of Culture in Edinburgh is delighted to take part in the Orkney International Science Festival 2024, one of the world’s longest-established and most original science festivals, providing a platform for fresh ideas in an island setting. This year’s programme includes exhibitions with themes ranging from earth to sky. The great Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, born 150 years ago, is commemorated in the exhibition Fortitudo by the Italian artist Paola Folicaldi Suh dedicated to the Shackleton Antarctic expedition of 1914-17.
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic journey of 1914-17 was the last major expedition of the great age of Antarctic exploration. His ship was named Endurance, and the way in which he and his crew coped with the immense challenges following her loss, with their stranding on Elephant Island and the mission by small boat to South Georgia to seek rescue, will long be remembered as one of the great feats of human endurance. Paola Folicaldi Suh has never been to the Antarctic, yet through immersing herself in the diaries of Ernest Shackleton and the photographs of Frank Hurley she has produced an outstanding series of paintings of the Endurance Expedition of 1914-17. The photographs she had to work from were all black and white, but through reading Shackleton’s evocative descriptions she created her own colour palette which she interpreted as more representative of the conditions the men on the Endurance Expedition would have encountered 100 years ago than the bright images of blue and white which we are accustomed to seeing today. The name Fortitudo comes from the family motto Fortitudine vincimus (‘By endurance we conquer’), which also gave rise to the name of Shackleton’s ship Endurance. The paintings, developed from the photographs and diaries of expedition photographer Frank Hurley, are on canvases made with upholstery fabrics.
Paola Folicaldi Suh is an Italian painter who lives between Italy (Fermo) and Sweden (Sigtuna, Stockholm region). In addition to painting, she studied restoration (“Institute of Book Pathology” Rome and “Book School” Urbino). This allowed her to deepen her study of the techniques and materials used in the past. Her painting combines her wealth of knowledge with great sensitivity and an innate curiosity for the world around her, often resulting in an original interpretation.
