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?…