Puffins in Adelaide
Tuesday, 13 March 2018Maureen and I made a quick trip to the southern Australian city of Adelaide to catch Neil Armfield’s operatic take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Robert Lepage production of The Far Side of the Moon along with assorted other art and events at the Adelaide Arts Festival.
▲ Like Emily Floyd’s Icelandic Puffins which can be see at the Samstag Gallery on North Terrace until 3 June 2018. She juxtaposes big, bright puffin models with the names of assorted culprits in the 2008 Icelandic financial meltdown. Three big Icelandic banks – Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing – all collapsed.
▲ I saw plenty of real puffins when I visited the wonderful Faroe Islands in 2009. Apart from at the Galapagos Islands, right on the equator, penguins are strictly a southern hemisphere bird and puffins fill the gap vacated by penguins. Except they fly. Indeed they are a bit penguin-like and with whirring wings they look rather like a child’s wind-up toy with the speed turned up high.
