Witnessing the impact of climate change at first hand in the Arctic Circle has inspired artist Adele Gibson to capture the beauty of this remote region in a series of oil paintings. At the same time, her interest in the way in which the ‘Anthropocene’ is altering the world around us has led her to record increasingly rare frost events at her home in Lewes using glacier water from melting icebergs. These two closely related strains of her work have been brought together in her solo exhibition, ‘Freeze, Melt’.

In 2018, Gibson was one of the artists selected for the prestigious Arctic Circle residency, sailing around the Svalbard archipelago in a three-masted barquentine, an experience which fixed the landscape in her visual memory. From her studio in Berwick, East Sussex, she works from watercolours she made on that trip as well as from her imagination to create oil paintings of the melting ice, influenced by the Northern Romantic tradition of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich.

 She says: “It was just the most extraordinary experience of my life. I was there for three weeks and had nothing to do apart from paint. We were sailing up the north west coast of Svalbard into uncharted waters, landing on places where literally nobody goes, in pristine wilderness. Everywhere you look, there are the most awe-inspiring glaciers. It has fuelled my work for three years since coming back.”

Closer to home in Sussex, she has developed a unique method of recording frost events which she has witnessed becoming rarer. She leaves paper out to freeze overnight, then uses glacier water from melting icebergs mixed with iron oxide mineral pigment which moves across the surface of the paper as the frost melts, leaving a unique pattern.

She says: “It occurred to me that in the course of my lifetime frost events are becoming quite rare compared to my memories of growing up. The difference between one and one and a half degrees is the difference for us between having frost and not having frost. The method that I use is definitely more art than science, but it’s my way of making a note of what’s happening with our climate.”

In 2016, Gibson studied for an MA in Fine Art at the University of Brighton and spent two years researching and reading the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “That’s when I decided to make the switch from a landscape painter to someone who was going to focus on environmental matters,” she says. In 2018, she won an Arts Council grant to host a residency and exhibition at the University of Brighton called ‘Let’s talk about the Anthropocene’.

She says: “I want to show a body of work that is meaningful. Part of it is sharing the way I feel about that region and how vulnerable it is. There’s definitely a strong emotional content to my work that I hope people will respond to.”