David CassDecember 09, 2019

Ataani

David CassDecember 09, 2019

Ataani

— Beneath | Greenlandic

Artist Rhea Banker reflects on a climate focussed residency in the Svalbard Archipelago

At the core of Rhea Banker’s practice is her “search for an entrance into a place’s evolutionary story.” Through both macro and micro photography, Rhea captures details of landscape history. She layers and merges photographs to create single visual narratives. The process is similar, she tells us, to her investigation of a new place – “searching the layered image for additional discoveries” – digitally highlighting what she calls “portals of place” in the finished work. Rhea has just returned from an arts & science Arctic Circle Residency, exploring the impacts of climate change in the Svalbard Archipelago.

These truly are days of deepness: deep time, deep space, deep oceans, deep ice. Our world’s observers are traveling to remote destinations, bearing witness, collecting data, offering findings, predicting change.

But even as these findings are shared, they are quickly dismissed, quickly lost – like a fjord obscured by fog, or a track washed away by a rising tide. As coastlines collapse, waves pass unseen once they reach the open sea.

Changing Arctic Light 2019 — **Changing Arctic Light** 2019

As an artist, I am amazed by both the unseen and the unseeing. Perhaps that is why – in my own role as witness and storyteller – I have focused on the small, the layered, that which is buried beneath the Earth’s surface at its very edges. The stories held within the Earth’s crust are those of movement through time, of origin, destruction, and new beginnings.

Whether on the chiselled coasts of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, or along Greenland’s western coasts above the Arctic Circle, the early travel of continents is now frozen in a shared geology. The deeply veined rocks that embrace Lewis’s Valtos coast vibrate with brilliant patterns of upheaval. And If one looks at the ice-swept mountain looming high over Greenland’s Uummannaq Island, deep within the rock patterns and clinging to stone slipping into the sea, the stages of the planet’s “becoming” can be seen everywhere.

The haunting mountains of Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago, their details exposed through fading snow and melting ice, tell their story in a dramatic meeting of movement and stillness.

The scattered boulders, the coarse scree, the inevitable scatter along the coast, all sit silently at the base of retreating glaciers. Trying to focus on both the large landscape that is now at risk, and the smallest details that offer proof of this present danger, is a huge challenge for anyone committed to bearing witness.

Now, while examining images I captured in a shifting Arctic landscape, I find my creative landscape shifting, as well. The strength I have drawn in the past from life within the stone, from the stories I have felt and the textures I have shared, where do I now place my feet in a time of such heavy cloud cover?

I do know that beneath the sea, we are all connected. From the depths of the ocean floor to the heights of windswept mountains, the changing Earth holds endless messages of revelation and continuity and we all need to listen.