Ice Flows

Ice Melting, Jo Dacombe, 2020

In producing IMMINENT, my zine of contemporary art and poetry in response to environment, I feel that I am in collaboration with other artists and poets. The work that they submit I then curate in a way that creates a flow between each item, a forwards and backwards flow, with one item feeding another. I also create my own work, which is often a direct response to theirs.

In Issue 1 I wrote about the material, and I often think about the meaning of material, the stuff in the world that we make things out of and that we touch with our hands. The images published in Issue 2 were important in their use of material, either in the way that the images were made through material processes, or through their reference to water, which then further inspired my own thinking and the work that I produced to tie the collection together.

Mary Hayes’ work, Ice Cold, was created using a solar plate printing method from an image of the surface of a rusty iron sculpture by Richard Serra. This image reminded Mary of ice floes that she had seen in Iceland, and the rising sea levels due to global warming melting the ice. I loved the idea that the image had been created from an iron surface degraded by water which then became an image redolent of ice melting, thus turning back to water.

Mita Solanky’s work, we all breathe the same sky, is a chemigram, made using household chemicals on photographic paper. Through this process she felt that the work referenced the crises we are facing in having polluted our environment for so long.

Helen Goodwin's image is a photograph entitled Shadowed Edge - Skipsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, where I once owned a small wooden chalet now lost to the sea. The photographed shadow on the shore tells the tale of that which was once there but disappeared with the movement of water.

I have been making microscopic photographs for a while now, in an exploration of material but also of things we cannot see with the naked eye. In response to Helens' image, I photographed watercolour paint on textured paper through a microscope, with a result that reminded me of a coastline, and referenced back to something I had written about in my book Imagining Woodlands about what happens when coastlines are viewed at different scales. A sense of scale, as well as time (time is also referenced in Helen's image) are both themes that are significant in climate change.

Ice Melting, Jo Dacombe, 2020

My own image, Ice Melting, (I'm showing two of the original images in this post) was made in response to the collection of poems and images represented in the zine, with those emergent ideas of water moving and transforming. I froze a block of ice and then photographed it as it gently melted over a day. Close-up again, the images are like landscapes or glaciers. My chosen image was then transformed again by the blue riso print process for the zine, which softened the image and gave it back the glow of blue that I wrote about in the glacier piece.

I have found the making of the zine a wonderful process, exploring my own ideas but also responding to the ideas of others. I haven't reproduced the work of the other artists here (to do so would not respect their copyright), but you can see the images I've written about in the current issue of the zine.

Click here to find out more about Issue 2 and to order a copy.