Last year Lewes-based artist Adele Gibson travelled to the Arctic to witness the effects of climate change and is now hoping to spark a discussion with her work, as Simone Hellyer discovers
Like many local artists Adele Gibson started off painting the South Downs, which are conveniently located a short walk from her garden studio in Lewes. But since picking up a copy of A World Without Ice, a book on climate change by geophysicist Henry Pollack, Adele has wanted to paint nothing but ice.
“I am an ice painter,” Adele declares as she shows me around her home and studio in Lewes. Not that I need the explanation, for the walls of her suburban home are covered with large and dramatic depictions of the ice glaciers of the far north.
Her love affair with ice and a concern about the effects of climate change were the inspiration behind her decision to undertake an MA in fine art at the University of Brighton. For the course she created a series of paintings inspired by trips to Iceland to witness the effects of global warming on glacier ice first hand.
“I was blown away by the landscape when I first visited Iceland and I just didn’t want to paint anything other than ice. I live on the Downs and it is beautiful, but there are lots of people painting this landscape and doing my MA just gave me a different perspective. It’s about making art to say something meaningful,” she explains.
That desire to create work that says something about the world we live in is what inspired her to take up an artistic residency onboard a ship that travelled to the Arctic last summer.
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