黑料不打烊

Cristea Roberts Gallery is delighted to present Melting Ice | Rising Tides, a solo exhibition by Emma Stibbon. In a pivotal body of work, the artist presents new drawings, prints and an immersive installation, that bring us to the front lines of climate change, connecting vanishing polar ice and surging sea-levels with the unprecedented erosion taking place on UK coastlines.

Like J.M.W Turner centuries before her, Stibbon bears witness to the changing landscape around us, bringing this powerful body of work to a London audience for the first time.

The exhibition opens with Berg II and Sea Ice, Svalbard, 2023, haunting, large-scale watercolours based on the artist鈥檚 expedi tions to the High Arctic and the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Stibbon begins by making numerous sketches out in the field; the artist has described how the weather often works its way into the drawings, with spots of snow permanently marking the paper or media freez ing on the page.

These preliminary drawings form the basis of her paintings when the artist returns to her studio in Bristol. The resulting watercol ours, monumental in size, depict sea-ice breaking over dark seas and ice-bergs shrouded in sea-mist, disappearing into the horizon.

With sea-levels estimated to rise by 1-5m by the end of this century due to ice sheet melt, Stibbon鈥檚 work is an urgent call to action; many of these glaciated sites have changed beyond recognition in only a matter of years, with catastrophic repercussions for commu nities, wildlife and coastlines. For the next chapter of her research, the artist returned to UK shores, to the soft chalk coastlines of Sussex, where unstable cliffs are falling into the sea at an increas ing rate due to rising sea-levels.