Monumental, Yet So Fragile: Arctic Landscapes by Emma Stibbon

Mariabruna Fabrizi

German-born artist Emma Stibbon did her studies in England, where she currently works. Her production is mostly composed of monochrome drawings on paper, often in large-scale formats.

The works take inspiration from the North-European romantic tradition of landscape views, but Stibbon’s natural and built subjects slowly reveal the heavy traces of human intervention on the environment. Landscape is no longer celebrated for its wilderness striking human beings, but recorded in its fragility, as it is often shown either eroded or transformed.

Emma Stibbon’s creative process requires her to work on location and register landscape features in first person through sketches and photos which are then reproduced on paper. She also took part in the Arctic Circle 2013, an art and science expedition to the Arctic Circle.

I am interested in environments that are in a condition of flux or change. Landscape is a central concern – whether that’s man-made such as buildings in a state of demolition or abandon, quarried landscape or thru the forces of nature such as geologically changing or glacially eroded landscape. I am interested in how the apparently monumental or permanent can be so fragile. Emma Stibbon

We are witnessing a dramatic melt within our own lifetime. As an artist I am moved to somehow respond to this. For me the challenge is to represent the fragility of the subject through the composition and material construction of the image. Emma Stibbon.