“I hope my drawings can serve as a record of landscapes that are disappearing…
beauty can be a powerful way to communicate urgency.”
In the work of Zaria Forman, drawing becomes an act of preservation. Vast fields of ice, water, and sky are rendered by hand, translating fragile environments into surfaces that can be held, studied, and remembered.
Her images carry a quiet tension—between stillness and loss, observation and disappearance. What appears monumental is, in fact, transient. Each work functions as both document and elegy, recording a world in the process of change.
In 2016 & 2017 Zaria Forman was invited to join NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science mission that has been mapping changes in the ice at both poles for over a decade. Forman joined some of their flights over Antarctica, Greenland and Arctic Canada. The aircrafts were equipped with a whole suite of instruments including lasers, radars, an infrared sensor, digital photography and a gravimeter (an instrument used to measure gravity). Flights were 12 hours on average, day after day, and soared only 1,500 feet above glaciers, sea ice, and mountain ranges.
As our climate changes, ice melt is speeding up. The rate at which the whole of Antarctica is shedding ice has tripled over the past decade. The IceBridge missions are collecting critical information that can tell us how this ice loss is occurring—and what these changes mean for sea level rise and coastal communities around the world.
"In 2016, during a four week art residency aboard the National Geographic Explorer, I had the opportunity to experience something few people ever do: the ethereal majesty of Antarctica. Although I have traveled over the planet from Greenland’s ice sheet to the Sahara Desert, Antarctica was unlike anything I had ever seen. The towering ice radiated a sapphire blue that took my breath away.
Many of us are intellectually aware that climate change is our greatest global challenge, and yet the problem may feel abstract, the imperiled landscapes remote. I hope my drawings make Antarctica’s fragility visceral to the viewer, emulating the overpowering experience of being beside a glacier."
"In August 2012, I led an Arctic expedition up the NW coast of Greenland. Called "Chasing the Light", it was the second expedition the mission of which was to create art inspired by this dramatic geography. The first, in 1869, was led by the American painter William Bradford. My mother, Rena Bass Forman, had conceived the idea for the voyage, but did not live to see it through. During the months of her illness her dedication to the expedition never wavered and I promised to carry out her final journey.
These drawings were inspired by this trip. Documenting climate change, the work addresses the concept of saying goodbye on scales both global and personal. In Greenland, I scattered my mother’s ashes amidst the melting ice."
Images & words courtesy of Zaria Forman.
