Svalbard, 79.75° North: Pack Ice II State I Shifting

Edition 10/10

"Pack Ice II" was conceived after The Arctic Circle Residency, sailing the waters of Svalbard, Norway in June 2019; a then record-breaking month for soaring temperatures in the Arctic. As an etcher whose iterative work lies between creation and destruction, Svalbard’s dichotomies spoke to me. I spent hours watching ice break apart and transform; I realized that copperplates act the same way in acid and any work I made about this would have to be destroyed as part of the making in order to be true. Copperplate etchings were a natural choice as the copper, in acid, erodes like melting ice; a natural resource incrementally lost. “Pack Ice II” began with an image of ice across five copperplates that were incrementally destroyed by ferric chloride and printed in various combinations. The plates were regularly reshaped in acid until nearly “destroyed.” These were printed in two parallel editions of 10 for each etched state, with one being the variable edition, "Shifting." The end result is a series of 100 etchings. During the Residency, our ship became locked in pack ice for twelve hours off the northwest coast of Svalbard. With encroaching ice dictating the ship’s mobility, the enormity of the environment was made clear. It was humbling, wondrous, and shameful: that humans could destroy something so immense was, in that moment, inconceivable. However, the ship was locked in unseasonably low-latitude pack ice because of disruptions to ocean currents caused by the catastrophic melting of the Greenland ice sheet. In a crisis known as "Arctic Amplification," the region is warming alarmingly faster than the rest of the planet. An April 2020 report in the European Geosciences Union’s journal, The Cryosphere, states that the Greenland ice sheet generated approximately 560 gigatons of meltwater runoff in the summer of 2019, whereas only 54 gigatons of ice accumulated on the sheet the entire year. This was the greatest drop on record; studies predict future melting periods could be twice as high.