Melting Ice | Rising Tides
Exhibition
Emma Stibbon’s first large-scale show at a major UK institution acts as a stark reminder that the seemingly remote events of polar ice sheet melt are directly connected with the changes we are witnessing in our local, more familiar UK landscape.
Tabular Berg, 2023. The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth (https://www.chatsworth.org).
"Stunning! Really sense the movement. Almost expected to feel the sea spray"
Hope Gap, 2022, Ink and sea salt on paper
Emma Stibbon’s work is provoked by the wonder and drama of nature but underpinned by contemporary anxieties about our precarious future. Her work is grounded in research gathered ‘in the field’; recording observations through drawing, photography and film, which is then developed into larger scale works in her studio. The physical materials of site such as chalk, carbon and sea water, are often brought into her drawings or used as her drawing media, evoking the elusiveness of the subject in the material fabric of her work.
The exhibition investigates the warming environment of the polar regions and the impact this is ultimately having on the changing UK coastline, focusing on the Sussex shoreline local to Towner.
For a number of years Emma Stibbon has been observing and recording the precariousness of the polar ice sheets and glaciers and the profound effect that ice melt is having on global sea level rise. Melting Ice | Rising Tides will be a culmination of this work, making important connections between the apparent remote extremes of our planet and our local environment.
The exhibition features as its centrepiece Cliff Fall, 2023, a monumental and ambitious wall drawing and installation representing the rock falls that are an increasingly common occurrence on the UK coastline. Alongside it are a selection of Stibbon’s large-scale drawings and prints depicting vast ice fields and towering bergs, made in response to recent field trips to Svalbard in the High Arctic, and the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. The exhibition’s narrative around coastal movement, change and erosion, is completed with a range of new drawings of the sea and coastline of Sussex.
Stibbon’s work is provoked by the wonder and drama of nature but underpinned by contemporary anxieties about our precarious future. Her work is grounded in research gathered ‘in the field’; recording observations through drawing, photography and film, which is then developed into larger scale works in her studio. The physical materials of site such as chalk, carbon and sea water, are often brought into her drawings or used as her drawing media, evoking the elusiveness of the subject in the material fabric of her work.
"Captivating movement. I loved the dynamism of the bodies of water"
Coastguard Cottages I, Birling Gap, 2023.
Eastbourne Sea Groyne, 2023.
