Collapse speaks to impermanence and instability. Crumpling the image of Svalbard’s Esmarkbreen glacier, falling out of its frame, calls attention to the ephemeral and unstable nature of this environment. I have been moving my practice increasingly from two dimensional images to more sculptural, immersive ways to present images in a space. Playing with the ideas of light, darkness and collapse, I wanted to bring the image of the glacier out of the frame and have it collapse into the viewer’s space. What ways might be found to metaphorically reflect the tenuous, changing impermanence of a warming planet? During my Arctic Circle Residency that October in Svalbard, I saw that landscape plunge into increasing darkness. This work incorporates these experiences, using light and printed fabric to transform my image of the rapidly collapsing Esmarkbreen glacier in an area of the globe that is experiencing the effects of climate warming most rapidly and acutely.

During the 2019 Arctic Circle Autumn Residency in Svalbard we sailed around Spitsbergen and collected boatloads of discarded nets, ropes and plastic garbage we picked up in remote locales. Circle Draw is made in the moraine silt of the Chauveaubreen glacier which debouches into Ayerfjorden. I pulled a found section of fishing rope through the sand in a series of circles, reflecting on time, cycles, and our transience in this place.