Itty S. Neuhaus Schuck

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Sublimation: Learning to Die in the Arctic​

 

Water is everywhere and then it is not. The ice is melting at the poles. Will our shorelines be erased with sudden tsunamis or gradually?

 

The people of the North tell stories about spirits guiding the vagaries of nature. Their survival depends on placating the angry seas and persuading animals to be hunted.  

 

The Arctic attracts me because it’s a place that is sculpting itself, geology fast-forward. This artwork is in dialog with frozen places that I have experienced first hand – swimming in a glacial pond, finding a frozen sheep viewable through an opening in a patch of snow, waking covered with frost after losing my tent at glacier’s edge.

I can really appreciate being alive, when I am warm and safe in a cold and forbidding place.

 

I create incongruous Arctic scenes informed by Inuit mythology, pareidolia (what the photograph evokes, like a Rorschach), meteorology, glaciology, and mostly my affection for being in the Arctic, which brings human mortality on par with that of the plan

 

 

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