illustration
weaving
writing
about
Floating Freely Toward Oblivion
I
have been rendered speechless by the things that make up this planet
many times. I live for those moments. I hope to allow myself the space
and time to welcome them in abundance.Recently, however, I have been home, in the city. I have been reading and researching and looking for meaning through different avenues. The accessible kind. The kind that find their way to my electronic inbox each morning, while I am still asleep, all the way from the East Coast. I don’t remember how this one found me, or in what way I otherwise tripped on it and paused, aghast.
Iceberg A23a, the WORLD’S BIGGEST ICEBERG (one thousand five hundred fifty square miles of ancient, compacted snow), “Finally escapes Antarctica” (Scientific American).
The article was headed by a simple aerial photograph, mostly a misty greyish white cloud covering a blue so dark it was almost black, with one lone white block emerging from the clouds. In the photo the iceberg is not particularly beautiful, a badly drawn square with a ruffled white surface, alone in the sea.
I think the alone-in-the-sea coupled with the “freely drifts northward toward warmer, iceberg-destroying waters” (Scientific American) is what solidified the affect for me.
I learned upon further reading, following additional links, that the previous World’s Largest Iceberg, while A23a had been grounded in Antarctica, and the one before that were both shattered in the currents near South Georgia Island. They travel, not much by choice, through the ever present currents in the oceans and end up where they will. Their freedom is simultaneously expansive and dooming.
I think what I felt mostly was curiosity and intrigue. I don’t know what about, exactly. I had already been researching glaciers and was suddenly reintroduced to these freelance glaciers that I knew about but had not as yet fully considered.
I approached the striking concept of this HUGE mass of ice surrounded by a seemingly endless ocean through the practice of drawing. I produced, through hours of scribbling with and repeatedly sharpening a small series of blue colored pencils, 20x30 inches of blue, holding a 1.5 inch white irregular shape, glowing pale turquoise at its edges. Maybe it's the color that gives me shivers. That perfect pale green blue that is the color of ice shallowly shrouded by water. It only happens on a very large scale, never in a drinking glass, but it doesn't seem to not happen under these conditions on mountains or out at sea. Maybe there's something about the fact that it happens both on a mountain and out at sea.
Social or cultural predispositions to an intrigue in large chunks of ice must include my tendency to climb mountains. And that of asking writer friends for book recommendations. I read Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s small book Borealis, which heavily features glaciers, while on a hiking trip that involved not only looking up at glaciers but approaching one, scaling an edge, walking for hours upon the ice, staring down into the yawning, cold blue depths of crevasses, jagged and frightening but somehow also inviting and luxurious in their tremendous splendor. A willingness to absorb it all is bolstered by a bravery built, through climbing, on years of repeatedly telling myself that this thing that is not in “my nature” to do, this thing that is, by every count, insane and terrifying, is also somehow (somewhat) “safe,” “fun,” “the good kind of breathtaking.” A hard earned quelling of fear.
Aesthetically, it's definitely the blue. The color of nothing and everything. A color that I love and hate, depending on its application, my mood, and the weather. That specific, perfectly glacial, ice-under-water blue.
These things set me up to take notice of the article about the iceberg. I was prepared to receive the vastness of this thing that simply is and has been and continues to be, whether sitting at the edge of the world, or drifting, slowly, around the fluid parts of it.
The expansive use of negative space in the drawing didn't feel like a choice so much as a necessity. It is a lot of ice. There is a lot of ocean. How could one piece of paper ever express that magnitude?