Women Artists in the Arctic

Espace des Femmes Gallery

33-35 rue Jacob 75006 Paris France

3-26 June 2021

https://www.womenartistsinthearctic.com/

“This exhibition investigates the uniqueness of women’s art about the Arctic and aims to see if there is a different way—a feminine way—of investigating our moral relationship to nature and an ecosystem as unique and challenging as that of the Arctic.”

—Barbara Crawford

Messages from the Arctic

The Arctic has been a fascinating and mysterious place for the artists, explorers, scientists and adventurers who have been travelling there since the early sixteenth century. But it was during the late 18th century that the North Pole became a current destination and subject for painters. These representations coincided with the discovery of the mountain glaciers and the creation of the Romantic landscape tradition. C.D. Friedrich’s and J.M.W.Turner’s views of icy mountains obtain a metaphysical meaning and give birth to the sublime, used as the term to describe the experience of the feelings generated by these sights. Throughout the centuries, it had been those male, western travelers and conquerors shaping our consciousness about nature. It was not until recently that women were able to explore the Arctic for themselves.

Our exhibition gathering 18 women artists from around the world wants to present their approaches to the North of the Arctic Circle. The artists have adopted a rich variety of different media: painting, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, prints and dance among others. They have also experimented with various styles that embrace and respond to the icy and cold landscape, the environmental challenges and the ecological reality of climate change.

All 18 women artists create and tell a story that they want to show and share with each visitor, a story that reflects their own experience. This storytelling reveals two facets, often coexisting at the same time. The first is linked to landscape’s romantic tradition and the second shows an active engagement which wants to prevent the ecological disaster. Sublime vistas of nature’s immensity henceforth cannot be seen without expressing a deep concern for the future and a cry for help. These works try to find a balance between reality, hope and despair, the beauty of the infinite landscape and the destruction provoked by humans.

Such an example is Tamara Enz’s photographs. These sublime views present the Arctic as a 18th-century-landscape in which human presence can only underline the pole’s immensity. A contradiction is suggested: no matter how small the human scale might appear, the impact of human actions on nature and the ecological disaster caused by humans are massive. Theresa Baughman’s photographs find a similar balance between landscape’s amplitude and its fragility which she tries to listen through her Sound tape: Listening to the Glaciers.Those tapes do not pretend to result from any scientific study; they initiate a conversation with nature and invite spectator’s own reflection and meditation. Karen Vermeren’s works bring together two motifs of the romantic tradition, the window and the gray landscape while her plexibox, Esmarkbreen, tries to capture and enclose in a tangible way the Arctic experience. Danielle Eubank’s blurry views of the cold landscape recall the romantic tradition as well. However, her oil painting seems to trace the ecological disaster and Floating ice shows what is left from massive ice mountains. This aspect of global warming suggested through the poetics of presence and absence is also apparent in Angela Gilmour’s prints. Her etchings show in black and white what is missing, giving presence to the absence of a place “where once there was a glacier” as the title suggests.

Extract from

Anthi-Danaé Spathoni, PhD

Co-curator of the exhibition

Art Historian, researcher

University Rennes 2