“The most laborious drawing I ever made” is how American artist Zaria Forman describes her latest work on Instagram.
The work is on display at the University of Cambridge for the next 12 months. The drawing in question depicts a panoramic view of the Arctic: fragments of ice floating in a dark-hued sea, which she was able to glimpse during flights aboard research aircraft as part of Operation IceBridge.
This vast Nasa programme has made it possible to image “in unprecedented detail” the processes that link the polar regions to the global climate system.
An extraordinary experience, which provided the artist with a perspective that complements what she observed on the ground in the icy lands of Greenland and Iceland.
For the past 15 years, Zaria Forman has been crisscrossing the icy regions of the world, putting down on paper the landscapes that pass before her eyes, which she renders with her talented pastel-tinted pencil stroke.
Published on her Instagram page and regularly exhibited, her creations are breathtakingly realistic and resemble photographic snapshots.
Through her work, the artist is revealing both the splendour and the vulnerability of these ecosystems, which are crumbling under the impact of global warming.
“Chunks of ice calve off of Jökulsárlón glacier, flow through a short waterway out to the Atlantic Ocean, and then wash up onto black sand beaches.
“It’s the epitome of an ephemeral landscape, changing with each crashing wave as the ice flows on and off of the beach, crackling and melting until it disappears forever.
“It’s places like these that mesmerise me, and motivate me to document them in pastel on paper, so we may appreciate them, love them, and preserve them,” she writes in a post published on Instagram on Earth Day last April, during a trip to Iceland.
With a steadfast passion for the environmental cause, Zaria Forman regularly collaborates on projects run by associations and NGOs, such as Generation Equality, the Global Forum for Gender Equality organized by UN Women.
Last April, Zaria Forman proposed a “re-coloured” version of her drawing “Errera Channel, Antarctica No. 1,” to infuse it with “four shades of equality, that each tell a story about the gendered impact of climate change.”
Melting glaciers is one of the most powerful symbols of climate change and one of six planetary limits already exceeded.
In its annual report published last April, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) pointed to the alarming acceleration in glacier melt and record temperatures in 2022.
“Melting of glaciers and sea level rise – which again reached record levels in 2022 – will continue to go up to thousands of years,” the organisation warned.