A Lancaster University professor, whose current inspiration comes from glacial archaeology, has won a prestigious award for ‘excellence and innovation’ in water-based media.

Professor Sarah Casey receives the Royal Scottish Academy’s 2024 William Littlejohn Award.

The £2000 award is given to research, develop and produce a new body of work in a water-based medium culminating in an exhibition of selected completed work at the Royal Scottish Academy. This will also include the acquisition of the work into the Royal Scottish Academy's Collection, a ‘Recognised Collection of National Significance’.

Professor Casey plans to use the award to explore the potential of print, making screenprints using water-based inks made with ‘glacial flour’ gathered at post glacial sites in Switzerland and Scotland.

Glacial flour, also called rock flour, is the fine sediment made through glacial movement scouring down the rock over millennia. As the glacier retreats, sediment is left behind and its consistency is as fine as flour.

Professor Casey works primarily in drawing, exhibiting works with paper that test the limits of visibility and material existence.

She collaborates with scientists and museum collections and is currently responding to the ‘precarity of glacial archaeology’, making watercolours with glacial sediments on glass.

Said Professor Casey: “I am really delighted to receive this award – it will enable me to develop the research in new directions, extending my graphic practice thinking about the idea of a trace from the perspective of printmaking. I’m very excited about the opportunity to gain new skills and work in new ways.”

The award builds on Professor Casey’s ‘Emergency!’ project that she has been undertaking in Switzerland working in response to glacial archaeology and partnering with the cantonal Museums of the Valais supported by the Lancaster University Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account Fund (IAA).

As part of this project she will take part in a major exhibition happening across Switzerland this summer ‘Watching the Glacier Disappear’taking place across Switzerland this summer which focuses on glaciers and her direct involvement is with 'Sonner le Glacier' at Maison des Alpes in Evolene.

Her contribution is ‘Les Revenants’, an installation with wax paper drawings and glacial flour that develop the work produced through her Henry Moore fellowship.

The title of the work means ‘Ghosts’ but literally translates as ‘those that come back’.

This research builds on a fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, exploring the intersection between sculpture and drawing to communicate ideas of absent presence associated with human body, to develop means to approach the tensions of human and environmental loss and appearance associated with glacial archaeology now emerging because of global heating.

Linked to Professor Casey’s IAA-funded glacial archaeology work, a film, made in collaboration with artist Rebecca Birch, will be shown on September 8 at its ‘premiere’ at the Loetschenpass hut, a mountain refuge on the border between the cantons of Bern and Valais at 2900metres.