Svalbard Abstractions is a body of visual artwork based on my first-hand experience of witnessing climate change in the Arctic. In the summer of 2023, I participated in the Arctic Circle Residency, where I spent three weeks living on a Barquentine tall ship, sailing the archipelago of Svalbard with artists and scientists working around themes of climate change. This experience of the realities of climate change and mass extinction, and how they impact our oceans and world ecosystems, profoundly changed me. I have never felt more creatively connected to a place, or more humbled by an experience. Since returning home, I have spent the last year reading and researching to learn more about Svalbard and the polar worlds, with the hope that my experience was the beginning of a lifetime of climate work.

My Arctic project has two components, both based on my deep observation of Svalbard’s landscape: Svalbard Abstractions, a visual art series, and Svalbard Mythologies, a poetic work centered on interspecies dialogues and interviews.

Svalbard Abstractions is a geometric, mixed media, collage-based painting series where each work acts as an empathetical monument to different aspects of the Arctic climate and landscape. Through their geometry and composition, these works contain mystical core connected to understandings of deep time and interspecies consciousness. However, they also reflect the specific. For example, the black and white striped rocks you find on Svalbard’s beaches become a specific painted pattern, or the way ancient air bubbles are trapped in an iceberg appear on the canvas as tiny bubbles of thinned, hi-flow paint that I have meticulously blown onto the surface at just the drying right time.

This series references tapestry, which, historically, was a medium used for morality themes and political events that were considered societally important by patriarchal rulers at the time. As a contemporary feminist, I want to re-imagine tapestry abstractly and empathetically, focusing on the most crucial matter of our contemporary world: climate change.

In tandem with this visual series, I am creating a poetry collection, Svalbard Mythologies, which explores themes of climate change in Svalbard from the perspective of interspecies dialogues and interviews. This work contains a narrative structure which relates directly to the sequence of works of Svalbard Abstractions. This poetic project creates deep connection to the landscape, exploring wider themes of wonder, love, loss, grief, and longing. It also specifically documents what Svalbard is like now. I feel strongly that, as a society, we need not only journalistic works of writing on polar climate change, such as Line Nagell Ylvisåker’s book, My World Is Melting, or Barry Lopez’s all-encompassing, Arctic Dreams, but we also need poetic works about the Arctic that can speak directly to our hearts in new ways.

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Follow the progress of my project on instagram @moonrisekathy