Ice to Water

Holly S. Murray
2018

I feel a longing and sadness for the planet that has been ravaged by what we have done to it and what seems cannot be undone. And so is this a lament? Thinking about our world today in comparison to only 50 years ago, vast changes have occurred. As an artist I have always been interested in the world we inhabit, how we interact in it and how we treat our environment. The use of fossil fuels is causing our polar ice to melt at an alarming rate. I ponder, through my art, the impact of this process on our future. It is predicted by scientists that sea levels will rise by 200ft in just a few short years creating entirely new shore lines for all the countries surrounded by water. Antarctica sits on bedrock that is below sea level. As the ocean warms the floating ice sheets melt from below causing these sheet to collapse. Since 1992 65 million metric tons of ice have melted.

The ice and ice bergs are cracking and melting into another form, saltwater. The earth changes slowly, naturally, but consumption accelerates this process faster than what would have occurred had we better managed our relentless plundering of the earth; are all these changes inevitable? The bergs and ice themselves are beautiful, like the polar bear we admire and fetishize and yet we do not have the collective will to make meaningful changes to our production practices.

These are the kind of questions that inspire me to paint these images, there is a compulsion for me as an artist to make an effort to bring some kind of sense to our plight for myself and perhaps the viewer. There is a joy and pleasure in painting ice so vast and mysterious.