Emma Stibbon’s Sea Mist, Svalbard

I made Sea Mist, Svalbard from a residency where we were sailing to the north of Spitsbergen, in the high Arctic, and this sea fog was sitting along the horizon giving a very ethereal, dreamlike quality to the mountains, which loomed up out of it. Svalbard is extraordinarily beautiful, but of course it’s also one of the most rapidly warming places on the planet.

Experiencing this haunting beauty is, of course, underscored by one’s awareness of the rapid changes we’re now seeing. And for me as an artist, you know, that’s both a challenge and a commitment to see how I might represent that in my work. I’m interested in how I can communicate about an experience of being in a place, so making observations by drawing in front of a subject that kind of physical, visceral experience where I’m battling with cold weather and high winds and I’m trying to get my wet media down on the page.

I work out on site making many sketchbook drawings, usually in ink and watercolor, and I really want to try and capture something of the monumentality and fragility of what I’m seeing. So when I’m back in the studio, I can kind of look back through my sketchbook drawings and decide what I might take forward into print. 

Sea Mist, Svalbard is an intaglio process of printmaking. However, rather than a traditional intaglio process such as etching, it’s made with a polymer review process. So I draw the image in Indian ink onto a film, and then that’s exposed onto a light-sensitive plate, which is processed, and then the final image is printed in the same way as a traditional etching, where you wipe the ink into the pits and parts of the plate and put it through the press.

I like this method as it allows me, I can kind of develop the artwork as I would an ink drawing with the same kind of atmospherics and fluidity as working on paper. But it does have particular qualities. And you can see in the sky area of the image, the way the ink is separated and blurred on the film. And that’s something I couldn’t achieve in the same way by drawing on paper.