Ice Limit

'Ice Limit' was an exhibition of drawings and prints by artist Emma Stibbon displayed alongside the historic collections at the Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. The work responds to her fieldwork in the Antarctic Peninsula, as an artist on placement with the Friends of SPRI and the Royal Navy, and in Svalbard in the High Arctic.

Drawing on an outsize scale, the drawings and prints work focus on wilderness and the remote and how this occupies our imagination, in particular looking at glaciers and ice shelves as signals of change and transition. The Polar Regions are remote and disorientating landscapes where scale and distance confound the eye. Ice Limit explores the legacy of Romanticism and theories of the Sublime in relation to a contemporary representation of remote place. Triggered by recent scientific assessments showing increased instability in the Polar ice sheets, Stibbon’s observations of vast, icy expanses provokes the viewer to consider the beauty and ultimate frailty of the Polar regions.
Presenting drawings on an outsize scale, Stibbon immerses the viewer experientially in the work and invites reflection on our fragile relationship to the Polar Regions. Using delicate media; watercolour, graphite, carbon and aluminium powder, she suggests the elusiveness of the subject in the material fabric of the work. Stibbon affirms, 'At the heart of my work I am interested in whether the drawing process can offer a space for engagement and reflection on contemporary issues of transition and change in our surroundings.'
The exhibition raises questions about perception of our environment and how this experience is communicated. Stibbon's work explores how the act of drawing continues to offer a critical method of recording and re-presenting the artist's perspective, and engaging the audience's imagination with the Polar environment.