Performance, Tromsdalen, Tromsø, Arctic Norway Installation, Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norway, as part of the Dreams of the High North exhibition.

A Line Drawn in the Snow explores “the paradoxical human narratives that overlay the Arctic landscape—a frontier, a paradise, a marker of humanity’s impact on the planet.” The title borrows a line from Stephen Lezak’s essay, Meltwater: A Timepiece for The Arctic, which describes the Arctic as “a place that is teetering in an uneasy balance between eternity and loss…the border that separated the Arctic from human dominion, perhaps was only a line drawn in the snow.”

“I took a band of red silk into the snow mountain of the Arctic. I knew that I wanted to draw this temporal line, borrowing, and making visible the forces within the landscape.

The body leaned into the wind. The line became a brush stroke, a sail, a dancing drawing by the arctic wind. The line that was drawn, there, and gone, forward, or back?”

Images by Eivind Egeland, Blue Way, and Beili Liu Studio