Ghost Net Drawing, Svalbard 2021

Changes we are making on a global scale to our environment are accelerated in locations where I have recently made work. In both Canada and Norway, I have focused on visualizing precarious landscapes on the verge of radical change. Sailing around Svalbard, Norway, we collected large amounts of garbage, fishing nets and ropes. At each site, I used these objects as large drawing tools, dragging them through the sand and snow before we loaded them on the sailboat. I photograph ephemeral drawings situated in the landscape and print them on recycled fabric and paper. 

On the Arctic Circle residency, Laura Millard reclaimed a ghost net in Svalbard—one of many lost, abandoned, or discarded commercial fishing nets that plague our waters. Recovering and using the net to draw the symbol for infinity in the ephemeral snow, Millard continued her approach to large-scale land art by photographing the drawing with a drone and painting over the print, rendering it to memory, and preserved. As in the cycle of life, the land is returned to itself.

Noah Gano

Collapse & Circle Draw

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.