From the Floe Edge: Visualising Local Sea Ice Change in Kinngait, Nunavut

Ooloosie Saila, Long Landscape

^{Ooloosie Saila, Long Landscape, 2018. Coloured pencil on paper, 30 x 92 in. Dorset Fine Arts}

The project From the Floe Edge: Visualising Local Sea Ice Change in Kinngait, Nunavut engages with art history, visual studies, scientific analyses, and local knowledge to better understand the relationship between the community and artists in Kinngait with and surrounding sea ice change.

From the Floe Edge is funded (2024-26) through a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers International Interdisciplinary Research Project (KF8/230008) in collaboration with the West Baffin Co-operative and Duke University.

About the project

Padloo Samayualie, Spring (2018), coloured pencil and ink on paper, 38 x 58.5 cm. Dorset Fine Arts.

^{Padloo Samayualie, Spring (2018), coloured pencil and ink on paper, 38 x 58.5 cm. Dorset Fine Arts.}

For many Arctic communities and ecosystems, one of the most impactful consequences of climate warming is the deterioration of coastal sea ice which forms along its coastline during winter and spring. This coastal sea ice or siku, is of immense importance to Arctic communities, as it provides a crucial marine mammal and seabird habitat, is used extensively for travelling between otherwise isolated communities, and provides a key platform for subsistence hunting and fishing. The experience of coastal sea ice and the floe edge, or sinaaq, is also inherently very local. Ice edge formation and breakup can be widely variable from year to year, and its patterns at the local scale are largely uncorrelated with the sea ice that forms in the open ocean. Increasingly, the floe edge is getting closer to land, the quality and thickness of the ice is declining, and the length of the ice season is decreasing. Around the Circumpolar North, sea ice has been and remains a recurring motif in art history and contemporary visual culture. For Inuit artists, sea ice is closely interconnected with social and cultural identity. Not only is the frozen shore visible from the Kinngait Studio windows within the Kenojuak Community Centre, but the artist's own experiences of the sea ice, many as hunters, extends into the picture plane.

Kenojuak Community Centre View from Kenojuak Community Centre

^{L-R - Kenojuak Community Centre, Feb 2023. View from Kenojuak Community Centre, Feb 2023. , Photos by Isabelle Gapp}

Using printmaking and drawing, alongside satellite observation and sea ice data, From the Floe Edge examines the stories, science, and visual histories of the cryosphere by working across art history and glaciology, and in collaboration with Inuit artists in Kinngait. Through conversations and collaborations with local artists, hunters, and residents, who are inspired by and rely upon the sea ice, we propose an interdisciplinary, community-led, visually-oriented study of the sea ice and floe edge surrounding Kinngait to explore how, and if, our tools, visual and scientific might be used to understand and re-imagine our past, present, and future relationships with the sea and the cryosphere.

Project Team

Dr Isabelle Gapp: Dr Isabelle Gapp is an art historian who writes and teaches at the intersections of landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change around the Circumpolar North. She is an Interdisciplinary Fellow (Lecturer/Assistant Prof.) in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen and member of the Cryosphere and Climate Change Research Group. In addition to From the Floe Edge, Isabelle is the project lead for the Teaching Arctic Environments project between the Universities of Aberdeen and Manitoba, and in collaboration with the University of Washington and Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. She is an editor for the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) and convenor of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series (2022-ongoing). Isabelle is the author of A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 (Lund Humphries, 2024) and has published in Kunst og Kultur, ARCTIC, Konsthistorisktidskrift, Coastal Studies & Society, Sculpture Journal, and the Journal of Canadian Studies.
Dr Sarah Cooley: Dr Sarah Cooley is an Assistant Professor in Earth and Climate Sciences at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Her research investigates dynamic environmental change in the Arctic and elsewhere using satellite data. Her primary focus areas include global water storage dynamics, large-scale fluctuations in Arctic surface water, and Arctic coastal change and its impact on communities. She has previously published multiple papers on decadal-scale changes to landfast sea ice across the North American Arctic, and has conducted field campaigns in Alaska, Northern Canada, and Greenland. Sarah received her PhD in Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences from Brown University in 2020, a MPhil in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2016 and a BS in Geophysics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015. Prior to starting her position at Duke in July 2024, Sarah was an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon from 2021-2024 and part of the inaugural cohort of Stanford Science Fellows at Stanford University from 2020-2021.
The Kinngait Studios: The Kinngait Studios are part of the Inuit-led West-Baffin Cooperative in Kinngait, Nunavut. The collaboration is facilitated through the Kinngait Studios management team, notably William Huffman (General Manager & Marketing and Special Projects, West Baffin Coop), Audrey Hurd (Arts Manager, Kinngait Studios), and Juumi Tapaungai (Assistant Studio Manager, Kinngait Studios). Kinngait Studios is the longest continuous running print studio in Canada. Every year since 1959, the printmaking studios have released an annual catalogued collection of between 30 and 60 images, earning them a worldwide reputation for the quality and originality of the limited-edition prints made by its member artists (numbering 125 people). Recently, member artists have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2022), the Gwangju Biennale (2023), and with works in permanent collections, including the Tate Modern, Art Gallery of Ontario, Qaumajuq, University of Michigan Collections, among others. Since 2018, the West Baffin Cooperative administrative offices and its Kinngait Studios have also been based in the newly constructed Kenojuak Cultural Centre and Print Shop, a multi-use community facility. This new creation space boasts state-of-the-art printmaking and drawing studios, and a dedicated gallery space that presents a programme of exhibitions designed to highlight current and historical works of Inuit art from Kinngait Studios in the print, drawing, and sculptural media.