Emma Stibbon, Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head, 2023
We went to Eastbourne at the weekend for the Emma Stibbon exhibition ‘Melting Ice | Rising Tides’, which combined paintings of retreating ice in Svalbard and Antarctica with art made around the retreating chalk cliffs of East Sussex. Having studied the Seven Sisters a few years ago, I was taken aback to see how they have changed recently, with so much undercutting now that it looks like caves are forming in them, although of course the chalk will topple before that happens. Below you can see me posing in front of a rock fall sculpture in the gallery. Stibbon assembled old postcards to chart changes to the cliffs and re-sketched a view drawn in the nineteenth century by Elizabeth Smith Paget, allowing us to compare and contrast. She did something similar a few years ago at Chamonix, where Turner had painted the glacier and Ruskin (with Frederick Crawley) had produced a striking daguerreotype. While her predecessors ‘observed the drama of a sea of ice almost at the level they stood, Stibbon looked down into an exposed deep valley with “a dark moraine-covered floor, almost completely devoid of ice.”’ (Observer review)
The drawing above, Cliff Crevice, was done in part with chalk found on the beach at Eastbourne. I always like the idea of some small element of the landscape directly entering the artwork. Here, in an interview for Studio International, she describes two more examples:
On the subject of mediums, I have also used seawater. There’s a big sea drawing, Breaker, done in Indian ink. Oddly, I haven’t tried using seawater before, and the pigments dispersed quite strangely, organising themselves into some other form. One of the galleries features a series of drawings of the sea which I made on the deck of a wooden boat, while we passed from the north of Norway to Svalbard, which took three days and was very rough. I made drawings not intended as a work to exhibit, but it became apparent the further north we got that the ice in the ink was taking over. I had 20 or so drawings, and when I laid them out, you could see that progression: it starts out as normal drawings, and then you can see the crystals formed in the ink. I like that as a document of weather taking over the drawing.
I’ll end here with a photo of one of those ink sketches, in which you can clearly see the crystals.
