Rowena Easton is reunited with fellow Arctic-expedition artist Emma Stibbon ahead of the latter’s exhibition at Towner Eastbourne

Rowena Easton: In 2013, as part of a group of international artists, we sailed together around Svalbard in the High Arctic for a month. You went back there in 2022. Svalbard is at the frontline of climate change – warming more than twice as fast as other areas of the Arctic, and six times faster than the rest of the planet – so I’m fascinated (and scared!) to know what changes you observed that had occurred there after a decade.

Emma Stibbon: That was one of my reasons for going back. As you say the situation in Svalbard is acute. In the main town of Longyearbyen the melting permafrost is undermining the stability of many of the buildings. When they were built it was solid, frozen ground and now the foundations are at risk. Remember the Seed Vault? When they built it into a mountainside they were confident the temperature would remain below freezing for 12 months of the year to protect the crucial seeds stored there –the ground is now no longer reliably frozen. Glaciers and sea ice are receding at a greater rate than in previous years. And of course, the wildlife is affected, including the polar bears.

RE: Your show Melting Ice / Rising Tides is a culmination of years of observing and recording the polar ice sheets and glaciers. You make the connection between what we think of as remote places and our own shoreline. How are we impacted here, in Sussex?

ES: Towner is situated on the Sussex chalk downlands and I wanted to suggest how these big melt events are impacting on the local environment through sea-level rise. We can read about global warming, but it doesn’t necessarily make us think about our immediate surroundings, or how our actions are driving this.

In preparation for this exhibition I made two separate field trips, one was to Svalbard in 2022 and the other to Antarctica in 2023 to observe the Weddell Sea ice. Antarctica has the world’s biggest source of water locked into it and there are now questions about its stability. I thought: how can I bring that together with something local, immediate, familiar?

RE: How do you connect the Sussex Downs chalk coastline with the polar regions?

ES: Both have a sense of spectacular beauty. The Downs have had rock falls since forever, because chalk is a soft material, but even in the couple of years that I’ve been working towards this show, the severe weather events, landslides and cliff falls are noticeably increasing. The steps at Hope Gap – which are in one of my large drawings – have recently been closed off due to the erosive action of the sea undermining their structure, the historic café at Birling Gap has also been partially demolished due to an adjacent cliff collapsing. The impact of climate warming and sea level rise is right on Towner’s doorstep.

As an artist who often works from glaciated landscapes, I’m witnessing the acceleration of ice recession. I feel committed to record these changes in my work. Drawing is emotional; I believe people respond to creative means in a different way than they do to scientific data. Obviously, we need the science, but I hope that depicting these big events through drawing might encourage a different response from the viewer, and perhaps connect them more viscerally to what is happening.

RE: That brings us to notions of The Sublime, which suggests transcendence, incomprehensibility. Edmund Burke defined sublime art as that which refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. So, my next question is: Do you think that contemporary art can articulate those things that paralyse or render us mute? I’m thinking here about how we produce endless scientific data that measures and calculates, that tells us we’re at risk… and we appear to do nothing. In that context, do you think The Sublime is more relevant than ever?

ES: Yes, I do, with a caveat: art has a capacity to move and connect emotions, which perhaps data can’t, but I’m also wary, because what’s happening is a reality, not a spectacle. For people at the forefront – whether you’re in Greenland or Sussex – it’s daily life, daily anxiety and uncertainty, not a sublime experience. So I’m cautious about that, while acknowledging that the work I make is situated in a romantic view of landscape.

It’s important to me that the subject is rooted in an actual place and that my drawing responds to what I’m seeing. Traditionally, the viewer is detached from The Sublime, looking from a position of safety outside of the frame at something that’s awesome and capable of complete destruction. Through the scrutiny of drawing, I want to encourage engagement.

Maybe a ‘contemporary sublime’ has a sense of the viewer being in the frame? What I’m hoping to stage [at the Towner] is a big installation that allows you to encounter the work in a very visceral way; you’re walking into the work itself. At one end will be the big drawing with the rock fall, and then confronting you on the other side as you turn is a huge drawing of the sea, a big breaker coming at you. I want the viewer to feel trapped between the two, to give a sense of actually being in the place.

RE: In the popular imagination the polar regions are a tabula rasa: a vast blankness, or untouched space. But there is human activity there; people do live and work in the Arctic. Are you interested in documenting the human traces in those landscapes?

ES: The Arctic has many indigenous populations and is certainly not a vast blankness. I’m cautious about representing areas where I feel the indigenous peoples have their own cultural voice, and I focused my own work on Svalbard where there is a smaller, more recent population. I also show the (very populated) Sussex coastline. It’s always been well represented through postcards, so I’m going to have some in the exhibition that go from around 1900 to the present day. I’ve also been looking at contemporary locations depicted in early postcards, like the Coastguard Cottages at Birling Gap. When you put the 1960s postcard next to a current-day photo you can really see how it has changed.

I’ve also been looking at other artists in the Towner collection, like Elizabeth Smith Paget [1839 to 1931], who was working over a 40-year period making small, observation-based drawings of the Sussex cliffs. I’ve taken her locations and tried to redraw what she drew. It’s interesting to compare my observations with historic drawings from the past and document the shift.

RE: The act of looking is important?

ES: Drawing from observation really does encourage you to scrutinise what’s in front of you. It’s not about making good art. It’s a way of committing something to memory, which I’ve always valued. The digital capture of a camera is instant, but drawing takes you into a zone of investigation. It’s remarkable that I can really recall the places that I draw. I remember what the weather was like and what I was feeling at the time. I use photography, but it’s the sketchbook that brings me back to the experience of the place. Particularly in the Arctic or in Antarctica, where sub-zero temperatures make drawing difficult. The challenges of weather and time become part of the image and imprints the experience on my memory.

On a rough three-day crossing of the Barents Sea, I sat on deck drawing the sea to distract myself from seasickness. When I got back to the studio, I reviewed the 20-plus drawings and realised I could see how the ink was freezing on the page as we progressed northwards to Svalbard.

RE: I was going to ask you about that: Precarity is inherent in your subject. Do you use materials and processes that reflect that narrative?

ES: Yes, I often draw with earth materials I’ve found in the landscape. The white chalk in Sussex is ubiquitous and I incorporated this into my drawings on black paper of features such as the Coastguard Cottages that are perched on the edge of the cliffs. I wanted the fragility of the chalky surface to reflect the subject – you can literally wipe the delicate chalky surface away with your hand. The big sea drawing Breaker [in the Towner exhibition] is made with ink and seawater. The salt makes the ink disperse in a really unexpected way; I love that interaction with the materials and being slightly out of control.

RE: Towner commissioned you to make a large installation, Cliff Fall, for this exhibition, can you talk about what led you to made this?

I wanted to make a piece of work that suggests the immensity of the cliffs and how vulnerable you feel standing under them. I made Cliff Fall in response to the frequent cliff collapses along the Sussex shoreline caused by the powerful action of the waves as they hit the base of the cliff. I decided to make a drawing that would span the breadth of the gallery space with 3D rocks spilling onto the gallery floor – some of which I’ve fabricated and others that are locally sourced actual rocks.

RE: And finally, what’s your favourite coastal walk?

ES: You can’t do much better than walking the Seven Sisters, between Birling Gap and Cuckmere Haven – it’s fantastic.

Towner have published a book to accompany the exhibition. It contains many new works alongside an interview with the artist by Sara Cooper, and an essay, The Sublimity of Boundless Landscapes, by Richard Fisher.