In a Minute There is Time

A few days ago the date changed from 2024 to 2025. All my responsibilities are done here. There are moments when I feel I should just go, and yet months ago I intentionally gave myself this extra space. We live in an age when it’s expected that it will be just one damn thing after another. Just move on. Get over it. Go. So why am I still here?

I wanted to have space to think — about where I’ve been, what I’ve done, what do I want next.

A great lesson learned from managing an artists’ residency is that one of the biggest things that happens for artists coming here to work is that they have time. Time to work, but also time to think. To consider what work they’re doing, and how they might grow. I’ve watched a number of artists change extensively because of having time without pressure or expectations. I wanted that for myself.

For the past seven years I’ve been committed to a certain type of photography. Because of where I am I felt an overwhelming imperative to document. I would photograph what I saw as a witness to this place. Dark and light, cold and warm. It would be the truth, as best I could show it. It’s been a discipline I chose to take on, my responsibility to this astonishing place. I have close to 200,000 images of Svalbard, of both the changes I’ve seen in town and in the nature. While it is true that no place stays the same, some places change fast. This is one of them. I tried to capture what I could. So while that has been many landscapes, there’s also been a lot of photos of construction, the aftermath of fires, of emergency drills, of marches and meetings and just plain buildings.

But it’s not the work I was originally doing, and sometimes that leaked out. My background is experimental. My photographic work was always varied. Digital paintings, composites, mixed media. I had neither hesitancy or issues about working with early AI. As my photographic work here became more disciplined, my paintings, which were always figurative, have become less so. My cyanotype work originally based in taught perfectionism — that has been abandoned in favor of chance and experimentation. I guess experimentation is part of my artistic DNA.

And now I have the time to think about how I want to combine my work into a coherent whole. I am thinking, hard, about what I’ve seen and imaged, and what I can do with it. How can I transpose my life as an artist here into being an artist somewhere else? And how do I keep from being devoured by the eternal now in favor of a more thoughtful approach? What work do I want to do once I no longer feel the documentary imperative?

This is all unknown, so far. I have questions, ideas. I am talking with people whose opinion I value about some of the things I’m considering. But there are no answers. Answers will take a working studio and equipment I don’t yet own. Coming to terms with this Arctic life will take being in another place, and working in another different room of my own.