Artist: Carleen Sheehan
Title: Blomstrand Glacier, Svalbard (Glacier Cosmology Serial)
Year created: 2018
Medium: Pigment Print on Silver Paper
Edition: 2018
Height (inches): 12
Width (inches): 17
Depth (inches): 1
Signed by the artist
Signed Area: back
This piece is framed.
Description of piece:
The images in this series were taken in the High Arctic off the coast of Svalbard, Norway, in June 2017 and Iceland, June 2018. They are views into pieces of recently calved glacial ice—ice that had washed up on the shore after calving from a melting glacier. The ice was scanned by sliding the flat lens of a waterproof camera incrementally along it’s surface, a process that revealed intricate internal structures not visible on the surface of the ice. These are known as Tyndall Formations, after the 19th-century Arctic explorer and physicist John Tyndall, who first noted the complex forms that occur in melting glacial ice as air bubbles trapped internally react to the intense radiant heat of the solstice sun. The bubbles contain gases such as methane and CO2, along with sediment, pollens and pollutants from centuries past, and they literally bloom into flower-shaped structures just before the ice melts, releasing the gases held within into the atmosphere. Glaciers have served as repositories of both atmospheric history and cultural memory, and this work records this in a way is specific to individual glaciers.
Artist bio:
The central focus of Carleen Sheehan’s work is the intensity of contemporary space, with its accelerated temporal shifts and collaged experiences. Sheehan works with a range of media, combining drawing, painting, photography and printmaking, creating densely layered surfaces embedded with image fragments and material shifts in color and light. She works to create open-ended narratives that depict particular moments of distilled chaos. Her on-going photography projects document the natural environment from an intimate perspective, celebrating small fragments of natural ephemera: the movement and density of water, shifts in light, color and atmosphere. Sheehan has travelled to the High Arctic region and plans to visit Antarctica in the coming year to continue her work commemorating melting glacial ice. Sheehan is a visual artist, curator, and member of the Visual Arts faculty at Fordham University in New York.