Art and Environment Ice Seminar

IHOPE’s Art and Environment Ice Seminar was held on online on December 7th, 2023 from
16.00 – 18.00 Central European Time (10.00 – 12.00 EST). The videos from this seminar are available to watch below.

Our speakers were:
Bjarki Bragason, Artist, Head of Fine Art Department and Associate Professor, Iceland University of the Arts
Isabelle Gapp, Interdisciplinary Research Fellow, Centre for Environment & Biodiversity and Department of Art History, University of Aberdeen

Bjarki Bragason’s practice investigates the collision of human and geological time scales as it manifests in built and natural environments. In his ongoing (2009-) research project Three thousand and nine years Bjarki has observed the gradual changes to his grandparents’ house garden left to grow wild for 14 years, juxtaposed with larger scale paradigm shifts at a planetary scale, most notably at the site of Breiðamerkurjökull glacier where 3000-year-old tree remains appear from underneath the rapidly retreating ice cap. Bjarki’s work has been exhibited widely since 2006 in solo and group exhibitions internationally and he has taken part in and initiated research projects from the perspective of fine art, often intersecting with natural sciences. His work relating to ice is featured in Janine Randerson’s book Weather as a medium (MIT Press). Bjarki is associate professor in fine art and head of fine art at Iceland University of the Arts and has taught at institutions such as Reykjavik School of Visual Art, Angewandte, EKA, University of California and others.

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 Research Fellow in the Centre for Environment and Biodiversity and Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen. Isabelle is also the co-lead of the JHI Working Group Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North between the University of Toronto and University of Aberdeen, and an editor for NiCHE. Her first book, A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 is forthcoming from Lund Humphries in April 2024.

You can find more information on IHOPE’s Art and Environment Seminar series here.
The organizer for the Art and Environment seminars is Nicole Miller.
The image featured at the top of this page is Bjarki Bragason, Perhaps that in which it, 2014.