Positively Beautiful

Facts tell one part of the story. In 2020, seventy percent of Greenland’s ice experienced melting, the most since 2002. In northeastern Greenland, the island’s ice sheet saw twenty to twenty-five more days of melting than the historical average. The country holds the second-largest reservoir of fresh water in the world, but has lost nearly five thousand gigatons since 1972, with about half that occurring in just nine years, from 2010 to 2018. In 2019, Greenland lost five hundred thirty-two billion tons of ice to melting, a record, and between 2011 and 2018 it contributed to a quarter inch of sea level rise.

Art tells another part of the story: how the planet and its water, locked in a dance of freezing and melting, evaporating and raining, surging against the shore and floating from the sky in the most delicate of crystals, comprise a spectacular display of power and fragility. It is these two qualities that artist Zaria Forman conveys, bound like binary stars, in her large-scale photorealistic drawings of icebergs