Event

University of Brighton X Emma Stibbon 

A University of Brighton series of events to coincide with Emma Stibbon’s Melting Ice | Rising Tides exhibition at Towner Eastbourne. 

Lisa E. Bloom, author of Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetic (2022), launches the University of Brighton X Emma Stibbon event series speaking about current art practices that address understandings of the environmental crisis. Joining her will be artists Emma Stibbon and Xavier Ribas.  

Lisa E. Bloom, author of Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetic (2022), will launch the event with a presentation of her research into current art practices that address and challenge understanding of our environmental crisis. Drawing on feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives that reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic and its climate changes, Bloom argues that new ways of feeling, seeing and thinking are necessary for a more constructive relation with the world in which we live.  

Emma Stibbon will present on her exhibition Melting Ice | Rising Tides at Towner Eastbourne, a culmination of years of observation of the precariousness of the polar ice sheets and glaciers and the profound effect that ice melt is having on global sea level rise.  

Deploying physical materials of site such as chalk, carbon and sea water, Stibbon’s artwork evokes the elusiveness of the environment in the work’s material fabric and connects the apparent remote extremes of our planet with our local environment. 

Xavier Ribas will speak about  Dead Ice [Like Air Trapped in their Lungs] [2024] an installation of 40 photographs taken at the Juncal Norte glacier in Chile in January 2023, shown together with four archival images of an ice mummy of a child, extracted from the 1959 bulletin of the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santiago de Chile.  

The work addresses the receding of glaciers and the cessation of ice flows. Unable to reproduce themselves, melting glaciers are "washing the future into the sea" (Aldo Leopold, Think Like A Mountain (2021).  

Lisa E. Bloom is the author of many books and articles in art history,  visual culture, and cultural studies including her book Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the first critical feminist and postcolonial cultural studies book on the polar region, and her anthology With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) that demonstrates that feminist, postcolonial and antiracist concerns can be incorporated into the history of art.  

Lisa E. Bloom has taught and been a researcher at numerous universities and art schools and is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. For more information see: www.lisaebloom.com. 

Emma Stibbon RA works primarily in drawing and print on paper depicting environments that are undergoing transformation including the polar regions, volcanoes, deserts, coastal and urban locations. Her approach to landscape is driven by a desire to understand how human activity and the forces of nature shape our surroundings.  She does this through location-based research often working alongside geologists and scientists, and in the studio where information is transformed into large scale drawn and printed artworks. 

Xavier Ribas is a photographer, lecturer at the University of Brighton, and associate lecturer at the Universitat Politècnica de València. He studied Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona and Documentary Photography at the Newport School of Art and Design. His photographic work investigates contested sites and histories, geographies of abandonment, sites of corporate development and exclusion, border territories, and geographies of extraction. 

His recent works take the form of large photographic grids, often including text, archive materials, moving image and sound. Since 2012 is working in collaboration with visual artist Ignacio Acosta and art historian Louise Purbrick on the AHRC funded project Traces of Nitrate, www.tracesofnitrate.org. 

We have a budget available to make this event as accessible as possible – this can include interpretation services or other access needs we can meet to enable you to participate.

If you require access arrangements, please email programme@townereastbourne.org.uk two weeks before the event date so that we can book a service if needed.