Retreating Landscape: Tracing Environmental Loss in the Work of Emma Stibbon

Climate change has recently gained more traction within artistic circles, whereby artists draw attention to the changing landscapes in various places across the Earth. Many of these artworks focus on the Polar regions. Some artists amplify the message of the environmental crisis through soundscapes of shattering icebergs, pointing towards the loss of permafrost; others, like Tanya Kovats, draw charts to highlight rising sea levels and translate them onto paper or canvas in their work.

Significant legislation was passed in recent years to protect some ice structures, notably Patagonian glaciers by the Argentinian government in 2010. All of these efforts go to show how significant the preservation of these landscapes is. An English artist and printmaker, RA Emma Stibbon, has gone to great lengths to convey this message in her works.

Nature-Driven Methodology

Throughout her extensive career, Stibbon studied (through her creative work and by travelling on site) the remote and isolated landscapes, notably in the Arctic region and Antarctica. She frequently works on-site in collaboration with geologists and scientists, in order to develop a more comprehensive picture of the landscape that she depicts. This in-depth approach is one of the key aspects of Stibbon’s methodology: the proximity to her source. Considering the subject matter of her works (glaciers, mountains, cold environs), this often entails working in rather extreme conditions, notably sketching out an iceberg, while enduring seasickness on a ferry crossing the turbulent Barents Sea—en plein air taken to another level. For a series of works she completed at the Arctica Residency in Svalbard, Norway, she received the prestigious Queen Sonya of Norway Print Award.

Stibbon’s dedication to faithful representation of natural landscapes confidently places her work into the pantheon of Romantic art. Her work is a testament to the enduring legacy of Romanticism in art, albeit from a more sober and pragmatic perspective.

Notion of the Sublime Revisited

At the core of Stibbon’s prints is a sense of exposure to the elements and the landscape, two inextricably linked concepts that weave her works into the pantheon of Romantic artists, including J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and others. Much like artists of that period, Stibbon’s work is strongly informed by the notion of the sublime—a cornerstone of Romanticism. The term highlights the sense of awe and terror that one feels while viewing, as Edmund Burke put it, “the immense and awful places” in the landscape, underscoring not just the physical features but the primordial, invisible forces that are part and parcel of landscapes—the seismic activity of a volcano, thunderstorms, glaciers, forest fires, and more.

As a scholar of J.M.W. Turner, Stibbon’s meticulous attention to detail and mirage-like sensibility, which echoes Turner’s works, is reflected in her own artworks. For instance, Turner travelled to see the Mer de Glace above the Chamonix valley in the Mont Blanc range firsthand—a site Stibbon has visited as well. Much like Turner, Stibbon has journeyed to other remote locations, such as the Alps, Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago, and Antarctica, capturing the crystalline glory of natural monuments like glaciers and mountain ranges.

Impulse of Time and Weather

However, Emma Stibbon not only presents a veritable account of the landscapes (every crevice and crag), but also captures their wilderness and spirit: the invisible elements of weather that are steadfast companions of the physical topography. For the artist, the atmospheric and weather effects are inseparable attributes of topography, with the tangible and intangible presenting a double helix that she aims to capture in each work she creates. In Stibbon’s own words, she aims to “capture the impulse of time and weather,” as they present nature often in a more formidable manner, akin to a Romantic landscape, rather than a traditional pastoral one.

For Stibbon, these are not mere ice structures to marvel at—they are to be studied and observed, rendering them symbols of our unstable times. By completing such pilgrimages, she pays tribute to them, imbuing her work with a certain spirituality, similarly present in literary works of Scottish naturalist writers, such as Nan Shepherd and Irish theologian John O’Donohue.

Frequent absence of figures from the compositions is another hallmark of Romantic art, which puts landscapes center stage, lending them more importance and attention from the viewer. If Turner’s canvases are often populated with frigates and ships in his seascapes, Stibbon’s views have a distinct desert-like feel, omitting even the slightest hint of human presence. All attention is channelled towards the vast expanse of the glaciers, mountain ranges, and seas, highlighting their physical attributes.

A work that exemplifies this state is the drawing Ice Front I, Antarctica (2020) which Stibbon completed in watercolours, graphite, and aluminium powder. The drawing illustrates a towering iceberg that occupies most of the composition, demonstrating its vast monumentality. Stibbon depicts it slanted to the right. An invisible force appears to be shrinking it and diminishing its grandeur. It’s an evocative way of demonstrating the effects of an imminent crisis of global warming.

Stibbon’s meticulous illustration of the minutiae that comprise the ice monument is phenomenal; each crevice and facet of the iceberg is painstakingly illustrated, elevating the dramatic poignancy of the work, while the pool in the bottom right corner foreshadows the next inevitable stage for the monument: its melting into the sea. In the artist’s own words, with this work she aimed to display the “dizzying effects of … constant calving of the ice front into the sea” that directly impact rising sea levels. The drawing exemplifies nature in perpetual motion, and what appears as an intimidating and impenetrable physical manifestation can soon disappear from the northern horizon. Here, the medium and the message are perfectly aligned.

In addition, the scope of her works poses a caveat or a revised version to Edmund Burke’s “the sublime” and what the definition constitutes today—that our environs are no longer a symbol of longevity, but rather of temporality. In her own words, the artist aims to convey the “impulse of time and weather,” two themes that are intertwined. Akin to a photographer, the artist aims to capture the place’s unique moment in time that might be subject to change.

Temporal Landscapes, Porous Surfaces

However, it is not only through composition and meticulous observation that Stibbon achieves the grand portraiture of majestic ice edifications, but through her materials, too. By collecting primary sources and fusing them with pigments of watercolors or inks, Stibbon infuses natural elements (seawater or burnt timber) into her work. Through this almost alchemical process, it becomes an echo of nature, an organic progression of natural landscape, not only through the means of representation, but through the materials, which enhance the tactility of the image.

Stibbon uses permeable materials, such as inks, watercolors, and chalk to denote the precarious state of landscapes today. The pigments are not only easily erased, but are porous themselves. For instance, in her five-meter installation Wild Fire, created as a response to the devastating forest fires that occurred in Dorset in 2018, Stibbon collected burnt timber in the aftermath, and placed them in front of the large-scale drawing itself, to emphasise the presence and urgency of this tragedy that fits within her larger theme of climate change. The sheer size of Stibbon’s works (some drawings reach two meters wide), in combination with porous and lightweight materials, creates an impression of a veneer. Considering that drawings are usually done on a smaller scale, such a magnitude almost becomes a metaphor for landscapes or nature being stretched thin.

Another aspect that Stibbon focuses on in her works is coastal erosion. In her latest solo show titled Melting Ice/Rising Tides, the artist explores the alteration of England’s South-West coastline, in particular the South Downs, an area well-known for its chalky cliffs. Stibbon highlights its friable terrain through the use of the eponymous material to illustrate the geographical attribute—in Stibbon’s interpretation, the illustration becomes just as fragile and easily erased.

Comparatively, the same longing for landscape preservation has been evoked in Danish Golden Age paintings of the 19th century, in particular the cliffs of Møns Klint, located in the South-East of Denmark, illustrated in an epic masterpiece by P.C. Skovgaard, The Cliffs at Møn (1851). Thus, we can witness how Romantic air permeates Stibbon’s landscapes as well, albeit rendered in a more somber color palette. This precise attention to the selection of the medium is what renders the artist’s drawings in a more vivid light, becoming almost a “stand-in” for the impermanent landscape.

According to the myths of indigenous peoples, climate change signals a rupture in the cosmic order. For the Australian Indigenous groups, the land itself can be considered both a map and a symbol of life and demise. This creates a very powerful metaphor through which to view Stibbon’s works. She almost eulogises these fleeting landscapes by adding material directly from the source that she portrays—sea water from the coast of Sussex, ice water from the Barents Sea, ash from the Dorset area.

All of Stibbon’s drawings become portraits of distant corners of the Earth that are fast eroding. In the spirit of the Romantic genre in art, she imbues each landscape with pathos and highlights the unique features of each site she visits—whether it’s a towering iceberg in the Polar Arctic, a majestic cliff in the South-West of England, or a melting ice floe in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. The artist’s means are eloquent, yet the message is thundering and clear: one can erase a landscape with the same ease as chalk can be effaced from paper. Lest these monuments to nature’s diversity become levelled, and Stibbon’s works become their posthumous portraits, it is crucial that we pay attention to the climatic changes and the accelerating speed at which they are occurring. Her artworks are visual pleas for preservation, not just for posterity’s sake, but for our own, too, recalling that we live as one with nature and call it home.

Author’s bio:

Anna Shevetovska is an arts writer based in Scotland. She received a master’s degree in art history from the University of St. Andrews and majored in product design in her undergraduate degree. She is also an avid practitioner of art and frequently sketches or paints watercolor at home or outside. She enjoys hiking and exploring nature.