Glacier Elegies

An in-depth look at Jaanika Peerna's iconic work, through essays, images of works and performances, and the artist's own words.

Much of Jaanika Peerna’s recent work is a lament to glaciers and natural ice. Her ongoing project Glacier Elegy forms the central core of this publication. The book presents an in-depth look at this iconic work, through essays, images of works and performances, and the artist’s own words. In doing so, it shows how a contemporary artist in her prime addresses the climate emergency. 
 
The book touches on ecological grief and looks at how Peerna and other key contemporary artists have used the subject of ice to highlight the global climate emergency. It includes essays by Robert MacFarlane, Janet Passehl, Celina Jeffery, and an interview by Joana P. R. Neves, situating Peerna's work and envisioning how creative acts imagine ecological relations in the face of rapidly changing climates and environments, giving voice to the difficult emotions of fear, trauma, grief, and mourning. Peerna's work offers us a way through.
 
"Whether in her large-scale gesture drawings on Mylar that become expansive installations, her smaller sculptural pieces that become receptacles for delicate inscriptions of light, or her videos and performances, at the core of Peerna’s work is a concern for the embodied, sensorially engaged subject in dynamic relation to the spatial and material world."—Taney Roniger

Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born artist and educator living and working in New York since 1998. Her work is in numerous private collections in the USA and Europe and is part of the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris and her performance Glacier Elegy was recently acquired by the Glyn Vivian Museum in the UK.

Zoë Foster has worked for Christie's and Anthony d'Offay in London and has run her own gallery. She now works for UNFRAME, London and consults with artists on key exhibitions internationally, such as the Venice Biennale.