Life Cycles

If you watch a seasonal time-lapse video of Antarctic Sea Ice as seen from space, it’s easy to imagine the entire continent as a living, breathing organism, growing and shrinking over the course of a year. Glacial ice on the other hand, accumulates very, very slowly, sometimes over tens of thousands of years - but, it does still move and is eventually lost to the sea, ‘calved’ off as icebergs much like a body sheds and regrows its skin. Mass Balance is a concept that glaciologists use to investigate this complex relationship. When the ice accumulating in a glacier system is equal to the ice being lost, it is in balance, in harmony.

In the series Death of a Landscape, Lucy took landscapes she had photographed and sketched in Antarctica and approached each one as a closed system. As one life - one journey, so to speak. Once the initial scenes were laid down in pastel and encaustic wax, nothing else entered or left the work - no extra paint, no scraping away. The act of then melting each one with the heat gun and the blowtorch led to entirely new works, despite them being made of the same, original material. The results are ghosts, memories of the landscapes gone before.

Note: The haiku poems quoted here are from the book Japanese Death Poems compiled by Yoel Hoffman and published by Tuttle, concerning the Japanese tradition of jisei - ‘farewell poems to life’. These poems were often written moments before the poet’s death.