ARTIST STATEMENT
‘There is nothing static about Antarctica’s glacial ice. At any one time, parts of it are moving, and shapeshifting, forming and consolidating, flowing and fracturing, eroding and melting … Perhaps Antarctica’s ice should be thought of as a verb rather than a noun.’
- Joy McCann, Heart of Ice, 2025
In summer 2025/26 I travelled to the Antarctic Peninsula, following a long-held dream to experience and respond to this remote environment first-hand. Every day I drew and painted in and with the elements – my washes of watercolour holding marks and imprints of falling snow, graupel and wind-blown rain, and my brushstrokes adapting as the ship pitched up and down. I was captivated by the striking blue glow of ice compressed over time, and the enormity and intricacy of a powerful and vulnerable environment full of life and motion.
My solo exhibition Flux delves into this impactful experience, including watercolour monotype prints and paintings, alongside a selection of sketches from the journey. These new works focus on
the continual weathering and transformation of glacial icebergs through interaction with ocean and atmosphere. At the threshold of solid and fluid, the endlessly varied forms and textures of icebergs are emblematic of an environment in flux. Through this body of work, I hope to draw this globally significant environment into closer proximity, honouring its beauty and its vital role in regulating the ocean currents and climate systems that connect us all.
EXHIBITION ESSAY by Dr Anne-Marie Jean
Beauty is not a detached aesthetic quality; the experience of beauty arises from grasping the unquestionable causalities and interdependences of life. (i)
Juhani Pallasmaa
In The Thinking Hand, architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa emphasizes how crucial our embodied experience is to our maturation as human beings, connecting the interdependencies of our bodies and minds within the living world around us. Through our global existence we understand the science of a changing climate and the interwoven animate threads and forces that connect all, across oceans and continents. How can we embody this connection to distant places, bringing them into an experiential realm? For most, Antarctica is well beyond our reach, so artists have gone there for us, their experiences seeding new inspiration, modes of practice and bodies of work, the rising of knowledge and beauty to inform, delight and activate us.
On the cusp of 2025-26 Annika Romeyn undertook a three-week return journey from Punta Arenas to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula traversing the Falklands, South Georgia and Signy Island on a HX expedition ship. Romeyn spent hours of sensate observation on the undulating seas, in blustering wind, snow, and blinding sunshine. Painting and drawing were interspersed with tutorials on glaciology, microbiology, marine life and history, as well as conversations with scientists and fellow travelers.
Romeyn’s focus was held by the icebergs, uniquely individual and emblematic of the changing environment. The life of an iceberg is fascinatingly complex and can be read in part by the shaped faces of its visible tips; arches carved by meltwater channels; fractures propagated by wave action, scalloped cupules registering underwater turbulence; contours smoothed by water and scoured by wind; incongruous angles marking tipping and turning, as the bergs melt and drift. Romeyn was fascinated by the role of icebergs in the rhythms, movement and life of the global seas, influencing flows around Earth, and supporting living ecosystems.
Romeyn translates the monumental, incremental and dynamic processes she experienced onto the surface of porous papers, in monotype printed watercolour. Applying her own force and scale to define a pictorial space she situates our bodies, eyes and minds in imaginary consideration of this distant place. Viewing these iceberg portraits, we leave solid ground, finding ourselves on the rocking buoyancy of a boat. Before us are frozen leviathans, their vast submarine bodies lumbering beneath the waterline.
In conversation, Romeyn recounts her journey as a place of blues and greys, which expanded the language of colour in her work. Subtle shifts of ultramarine and Payne’s grey move between receding purple skies and deep blue seas. Carefully pooled ripples of Prussian blue; phthalo turquoise mixed with ultramarine where the water reflects underneath an arch; primary cyan for compressed glacial ice. Blues to create distance, proximity, temperature and the colours of ice, atmosphere and ocean.
In the dramatic and intimate monotypes of Flux, Romeyn transports us to a distant Southern realm. Rhythmically detailed and shockingly blue, her works ignite our bodies and imagination, uniting our senses through vision. In Flux, the era of the sublime has passed and in its place is an invitation to proximity. Here an artist’s impression provides poetic witness to an environment that is shaped by human and societal actions, which in turn will shape our futures.
Dr Anne-Marie Jean
(i) Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand; Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture,
(John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009) p12.
