Art above by Ellis O’Connor

Written by Barbara Crawford

In the fall of 2018, I joined twenty-eight others aboard the tall ship Antigua and sailed from Longyearbyen in the Svalbard Archipelago north into the High Arctic. We were an international group of artists, writers, scientists, and environmentalists with one shared mission: to study this extremely remote and endangered land and to bring our stories back. The unique expedition, one of only two sailings each year, is highly competitive and results in a distinctive and accomplished group.

Our responses to the beauty of the Arctic were profound and deeply moving. The crew’s knowledge and commitment to preserving the Arctic’s integrity was inspiring. But I did not anticipate the large number of women participants (twenty-four) alongside the female crew members: four armed guide and a co-captain. Eight out of the eleven crew were women. The majority of those aboard exploring the Arctic were women.

I discovered my female companions seemed to see and understand this environment in a different, more nurturing, and communal spirit that was reflected in their art. 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. The artists demonstrate two fundamental ideas: first it that there is a powerful and noteworthy number of female artists today creating works about the Arctic; second, that their interpretation of the Arctic is perhaps uniquely gender specific.

Additional research about women’s involvement in the Arctic demonstrated that this is an area that has historically been dominated by male scientists, artists, explorers, hunters, and capitalists. It is only recently that the role of women—in the present and future—in the Arctic has become a focus of discussion. For example, in September of 2018, a conference sponsored by the Think Corner of the University of Helsinki focused on “Gender in the Arctic” and emphasized “an awareness of, and … a continued focus on issues relating to northern women and non-Arctic women who engage with polar realities.”

I have presented two conference papers on Women Artists in the Arctic and published one article in the photography magazine Don’t Take Pictures.

Barbara Crawford
Professor of Art and Art History
Southern Virginia University

Photograph above by Nora Silva

Written by Beth Jones

On June 10, 2019, we stood with our baggage and our anticipation on a dock in Longyearbyen.

I took a quick photograph. Regan Rosburg (whose work is exhibited here) stood wide-eyed, smiling, her head tilted back, looking up at the Antigua’s three masts. The sky was clear. She was overtaken, unmistakably, with wonder and possibility. We all were. We hadn’t set sail yet and it was already so, so beautiful.

For two weeks, the jagged edges and peaks of Spitsbergen, the fjords and rocky beaches, were in front, above and around us. The Arctic Ocean shifted from dark and windswept to bright and crystalline, at times flecked with blue icebergs - the massive shards of calved glaciers. There were waterfalls, arctic fox, seals and terns. Colonies of kittiwakes. Beluga whales swam in front of the zodiacs. The sun shone all night.

Sleep was an unreasonable way to spend time. The pull of what was visible 24-hours each day was irresistible. We were loopy with fatigue because if we closed our eyes we’d miss something. Polar bears. Soviet ghost towns. Each other’s creative work laid out in cyanotypes, notebooks, hydrophones, sketch pads, scuba gear, laptops, tattoo ink, conversations, cocktails chilled with icebergs and dozens of cameras from Super-8 and Polaroid to Leica and Hasselblad. We had the four best, most badass - and simultaneously graceful - women polar bear guards to ever walk the tundra. One of them, Emma Hoette, is also in this exhibition. Our captain and crew shared their knowledge, their time, their recipes, their cigarettes.

Geographically, Svalbard is at the edge, distant from almost everything, yet fresh strawberries are sold at the food co-op and pad thai is available at the Radisson. But as soon as we sailed away from Longyearbyen, things changed. On days when the sails were aloft, or we climbed onto the crow’s nest, Antigua entered another era. When we hiked above cragged glaciers or wandered through Pyramiden’s ruined mines, we moved back and forward in time. During the 17 hours when Antigua lost power and we floated toward the North Pole with no navigation system other than the crew’s eyes and knowledge, we were surely on the fringe of the planet.

Svalbard in the summer is a fairytale. Stark and stunning. Blue and white. Psychedelic orange moss. Perpetual sunlight. But the top of the world doesn’t feel so far away when it’s easy to fill enormous bags with plastic trash from its rocky shores. We lugged bottles, buoys, miles of fishing line. A discarded television. Entwined bird skeletons full of plastic bits were everywhere. At times, it was hard to reconcile the beauty with the inevitability of on-going change.

For those weeks, on the sparkling top of the world, while we weaved in and out of time and history and nature and plastic pollution and friendships and ice and art-making, our international band of merry short-term northern seafarers knew that we had reached a place that needs protecting, and is miraculous.