Pure joy on ice

Clear skies greeted the Antigua, a sailing vessel carrying artists into the Arctic Circle. “We were in the right spot for all of these belugas that kept coming around the corner of this little coastline,” Phil Irish describes. Two artists hooked up their underwater sound equipment to speakers. “Belugas are like songbirds,” says Irish. “They’re always chirping, whistling: we were out there just watching all these belugas and listening to their conversation under the sea. It was amazing. When I paint the belugas, I’m like, I’ve met them. There’s a lot of pure joy.”

The belugas feature in Irish’s series Niche Species, which exhibited at Lonsdale Gallery in Toronto this Fall. The series contains eight physical collages and eight large prints of digital collages, merging Irish’s oil paintings with the landscapes of Spitsbergen, the southern island of Svalbard, Norway.

Last June, Irish joined 30 artists for The Arctic Circle residency: spending two weeks at sea, and landing twice a day on glaciers or floating in a Zodiac to watch an iceberg, as the weather allowed. There were artists from India, Poland, France, Australia, Ireland, Singapore, the USA and Canada. “You start to follow a question,” Irish explains, to end up in a community like this. Irish’s question started with an art project in Banff and the Rockies; then the Fort McMurray oil sands; onboard Canada C3 in 2017, when he travelled the north shore of Baffin Island as part of Canada’s 150th celebrations; and now this.

‘The bird’s alive’

Irish lugged a frame onto the ice at each landing to pin small oil paintings of animals into place before snapping pictures. He took around 40 photographs per collage session. “I wanted it to be a thing that could only be made there.”

Self-described as a “landscape artist that deals with climate change and uses tools of abstraction,” Irish often creates large installation pieces (once, he installed an iceberg between the pumps of a gas station), but the constraints of international travel required him to think small for this project. And the constraints of time – Irish is a professor at Redeemer University – required him to create as he went.

“There’s a joy in just painting these wondrous creatures when you’re in the environment where they are, and you’re looking for them.” There’s awe in Irish’s voice when he says: “we saw a blue whale. It was incredible.”

At first, Irish intended to paint something environmental – industrial clouds, maybe – before he settled on animals. “I’ve done a lot of works in the past that have references to the fossil fuels and oil and the speed of our industrial life. And there’s a heaviness about all of that, which is accurate,” Irish reflects. But there’s a tension here, equally important, as he tries to “reframe” how we think about climate: “I think delight is important.”

The landscape became a character in each collage: “everything is trembling and shaking and you’re trying to pin it and your hands are cold and you’re trying to fasten this thing together, and you hope it holds. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes things blow over.” In some collages, the animals are dripping with water. In one, a bird came detached from its pin and blew, still connected by clear acetate, in circles: “it was just looping. So I got shots of it in every part of that circle. What can you do? It has a life of its own. The bird’s alive.”

What’s in a frame

It’s this sense of otherness, of the animals being out of our control (as they ought to be), that Irish was chasing. Back at home, when it came to creating digital collages, there was a surprise: the frame itself became a character, appearing and disappearing in the shots. “That’s when I really got visually interested in the making of the thing.” Stacking 30 pictures at a time in Photoshop, Irish began masking – erasing sections of each photo so that the shot underneath would come through, essentially rubbing holes in the pictures: “Which is a crazy way to think; all these moments in time are accessible.”

The physical frame lent structure and new questions: “What does it mean to acknowledge that we have a point of view, that we have a frame? What does the frame that we’re using enable us to see?”

Everything that appears in the collage, Irish says, is there because it connects to something else. Even if the pins hold a sadness – that the animals aren’t present in the way they were, that our relationships with them are broken – they are also a symbol of connection. “Making those connections resilient is what we’re called to.”

He recalls attending a chapel talk about creation as a gift, but the speaker only asked the students to “appreciate” it: “I kind of felt like throwing up,” he said, “because [this gift is] costly. And I think we can sentimentalize creation and just see it as something to give us good feelings.”

“You have these creatures that are fragile and holding on, and how do we love them? When we build – because we build all the time – how do we build with them as our neighbours?” Mary’s song, Irish reflects, is about God lifting up the lowly. “And in my work, the animals are the lowly, right?”

Our relationship to creation is not about “extraction and power” any more than Adam and Eve’s relationship, portrayed in Genesis 2, is about power and control. God calls himself our helper. “The most powerful being takes on the role of a helper. It’s like Jesus flipping the whole thing, right? It’s in Mary’s song, it’s in how we treat creation. It goes all the way from Genesis through to the end of Revelation, if we can get it right.”

Slippery meanings

We can’t control creation, or art: “if people try and simplify the work down to a message, it wrecks it. You’re meant to puzzle and wonder and feel, be more alive.” It’s about the artist following a question in “a visual form where meanings are slippery” and viewers can react in any way.

The question, for Irish, leads to places of awe: he remembers witnessing a large calving event. A chunk of glacier, the size of an apartment complex, plunged into the water and shot back up. Once, climbing a glacier, the gravel under his feet slid away and he saw that he was walking on black ice: “Everything around you is white and foggy and you can’t see hardly anything, and under your feet is this limitless black that’s just revealed to surprise you; this threatened thing underneath you that you can’t know the size of.”

It’s a chance to reckon with our own fragility, Irish says, but also the fragility of something much bigger than ourselves. “It’s devotional to be there because you’re surrounded by wonder. But also, there’s grief and lament through the whole thing.”