Grief and Hope in the Arctic Circle
How to stop time: Kiss
How to travel in time: Read
How to escape time: Music
How to feel time: Write
How to release time: Breathe
-Matt Haig
A shoe the size of my palm sits undisturbed on a shelf above the bath towels. Through lost pets, winning goals, birthday celebrations, the heartache of first love, the apprehension of the first day of college, and the excitement of the first apartment, the shoe never waivers. It never appears to change, and yet I know it does because I do.
But you see, the shoe has a secret life, steady and quiet and alive. The shadow it casts on May 15th at 10am is different than the shadow it casts on September 8th at 6pm. Between May and September this tiny shoe created no fewer than 87,840 new shapes that none of us ever saw.
This is where my work began in 2023, in front of a second story window in an industrial warehouse where I spent three months collecting shapes of shadows in an effort to pause time and monumentalize memory.
Sometimes as a silent meditation and sometimes an ecstatic dance, I’ve always been comfortable in a solitary practice, but found joy and growth in my connections with others.
When I learned I was going to Longyearbyen, Norway, the beating heart of the Arctic Circle, I began a new sketchbook. I knew the clock would tick five times as fast once I responded “yes” to my acceptance email. How will I spend my time? How will I waste time? What is time? And how in the world am I going to measure time under the midnight sun when an overcast day means no shadows and the clock on my cellphone glitches below 1°F?
I practiced different forms of timekeeping: clapping my hands, tapping my feet, counting my inhales and exhales, counting how many steps I took, and how many times I chewed my food before swallowing. I made drawings of measurement devices like sundials and sand glass and water clocks.
I wrote pages about kairos, the critical moment, the mythical time beyond the ticking clock. I traced the word apricity, a word that Google deems obsolete, and yet it means to feel the warmth of the sun on your face in the middle of winter. And I wonder if we lose winter, and snow and ice, do we also lose apricity? And what is apricity if not hope?
I arrived in Svalbard and as quickly as the residency began, it was over. The sun never set behind the infinite horizon of the Arctic Ocean. Our floating collective, gathered on a schooner named the Rembrandt, agreed to a digital detox, turning our two weeks together into one continuous day only interrupted by meal times and wake up calls.
Returning to port was disorienting. Reintegration was easier for some than others. The group chat quickly populated with stories of sadness, a near panic attack at a hotel breakfast buffet, tears in a crowded museum. Nervous systems that relaxed on the water seized and malfunctioned upon return, making us dizzy. Our throats closed and publicly fell silent.
Privately we shared virtual hugs and Arctic blue heart emojis. On land we sought refuge in bars and gardens and quiet streets under the cover of darkness. Then we slowly made our own ways back to our small corners of the earth.
I can’t recall the first irritant. Maybe it was the skier from the U.S. in Ny-Ålesund, with her fluffy red wool cap and matching gloves, taking refuge in the 24-hour museum because, she complained, it was too cold at 75°N.
It could have been the second-hand outrage I felt after learning the fencing outside my AirBNB was erected after a surprise rain spell resulted in a mud slide that killed a young girl. Because that’s what happens when it no longer snows but rains, and mudslides will now always be a threat.
It was probably the inter-generational debates under the 2am sun when we thought we were only one drink in, and it was still 10pm. One generation accused the other of weaponizing care, and the other accused the former of not caring enough. By 3am we were all a little wiser, united in shared rage.
The irritant was still in my lungs when I returned to Memphis. It tumbled around as I coughed and wheezed. Urgent care sent me home with a new inhaler. The acupuncturist poked at my ribs and said, “you are holding anger and grief; it’s here in your lungs.” A shaman said, "See if you can trans-mutate it into something new.” So, I did what artists do and sought the answers by painting.
But brushes don’t respond as quickly as my hands, so I put them away and used my fingers to draw, claw, and smear through the oily paint. When I wonder if my theoretical writings on the hermeneutic apeiron-that fancy way of saying infinite interpretation-has a place in my painting, I feel it as I draw a mouth contorted in a cry. Memory as a palimpsest of circles that don’t line up perfectly, one on top of the other.
Artist Georg Baselitz says “when you are irritated you pay closer attention.” I wanted to change the world, so I turned it upside down because painting isn’t a mirror but a reinvention of reality. And if Baselitz says that painting a head is the simplest way to realize an idea, I feel maybe exaggerating an expression is the simplest way to demonstrate the urgency of the current moment.
My work isn’t about my anger and my grief. It’s not about painting the perception of reality, but about painting what the body holds. It started by pointing a finger, “shame on you, look at the mess you’ve made.” Which then became self-reflective, “shame on me, how am I contributing to this mess?”
It morphed into a shared sense of loss and anguish-what have we done, what are we continuing to do?
We all left with our camera rolls filled with idyllic images of ice (did you know there are 95 different types?). Neither Gamblin nor Golden make paint in the shades of blue I need. And even if they did, under all the Arctic blues, after the snow melts, are piles of trash, exposed minerals running into the water and changing it from cool blues to warm iron oxides, disrupting aquatic life and fragile ecosystems. The world is melting, and time is both durational and immediate.
I no longer see the grieving expressions as only human, but also hers, the Earth’s, as she continues to give without reciprocity. As this work continues to unfold in my studio, an instrumental song on repeat facilitates a meditation on the transmutation of grief and anger, and an exploration of kairos, also known as the critical moment.
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