“WHY ARE YOU HERE?”

That’s the question Derek Eland, Everest’s first artist-in-residence, asked every climber at Base Camp. And nobody said, “because it’s there”...

Everest’s first artist-inresidence didn’t travel to Nepal to paint landscapes or seek out sublime views. He didn’t pack easels, watercolours or oils, either. Rather, Cumbria local Derek Eland is interested in stories. He’s taken his work to extreme places: living for a month with the British Army on the front line in Helmand Province, for instance. And he’s always loved the mountains.

Most of his art is done on location and revolves around people, asking what it is to be human in stressful or extremely demanding situations. In 2009, after the Cumbria floods, he worked in Cockermouth to create an artwork for the town telling the stories of the people who live there. The idea to locate a project at Everest Base Camp had been rattling around for a while when, in conversation with a Cumbrian newspaper, the phrase ‘Everest artist-inresidence’ came up. BBC Radio 4 picked up on it the evening after the story was published, and it was reported on

BBC Breakfast the following day. The Carlisle-based artist was watching and thinking, “God, I’m going to have to do this now.”

Zip forward a few months and with funding secured, brand support and a helping hand from 12-time Everest summiteer Kenton Cool, the project was rolling. Stacks of postcards the colour of prayer flags, bundles of pens, an instant-print camera and a big, yellow tent were packed off to Nepal. The idea was to ask climbers, trekkers and Sherpas why they had come to Everest to – potentially – risk their lives climbing it. Anyone could go to the tent, pick up a pen and try to answer the same three questions on a little square of paper: Why are you here? Why are you really here? What does this place mean to you?

“There’s no simple answer to the question, really,” says Derek. “No-one ever said, ‘I just want to do it because it’s there’ or anything. It was much, much deeper than that.”

All notes were written by hand, using pens that work at high altitude and in freezing conditions. Around 200 people came in to scribble down their stories which, along with a portrait snapped on a Fuji Instax 90 camera, were pinned to the canvas walls. The exhibition began to create itself from the start.

“For a lot of people it was like a pilgrimage. And there’s the aspirational bucket list thing. But I think if you look deeper than that, quite often, certainly with a lot of trekkers, there was a solitariness, just wanting to get away, that really came out in these stories. There’s always some kind of back story.

“These tales were revealed through the handwritten accounts. For the climbers too, there was often an event in their lives that had driven them to this particular point, and those events varied in severity.”

There was the story of one Australian woman whose husband summited in 2012, they were married the same year and since then he beat cancer twice. They came back to Everest in 2016 as a mark of overcoming something almost insurmountable. One German man met a woman at Base Camp, they got married, had a child and returned together, him carrying his daughter’s sock to the summit to say thanks. There were stories of redemption and instances of real tragedy, such as an Irish woman who lost her father, sister and brother