The University of West Hungary published a textbook last month which included an article by local artist Katie Craney.
She wrote about artists’ unique ability to see and communicate climate change. Craney, a decade-long Southeast transplant from Wisconsin, said the northern hemispheres’ rapidly changing climate has been both blatant and inextricable in her work.
She uses found materials to transmit images of shifting landscapes on small hand-cut scrap metal.
“Alaska is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world; how do we keep thinking it’s a farce?” Craney said. “It’s something I couldn’t not talk about since it’s something I pay attention to so much.”
In April 2016, a university professor contacted Craney to commission the article based on her former work.
In her article “Deciphering Change in the Alaskan Landscape,” Craney writes that “the Alaskan landscape challenges those who try to depict the experience of place through visual language.” She contends that increasingly unpredictable weather patterns make it difficult to visualize, measure, and adapt to living on and with the land.
National Weather Service statistics show that the first two weeks of May in Haines have warmed by an average of three degrees since 2000. More active permafrost melting last fall contributed to a significant mudslide that closed Haines Highway for a weekend. Chilkat Valley bears denned later this year due to unusually high winter temperatures. Poor snowpack resulted in another poor heliski season for tour operators in 2019. Spring saw higher-than-average pollen counts and a longer allergy season. Four malnourished dead grey whales washed up on Alaskan shorelines this year (contributing to about 70 along the western coast); biologists say warmer waters and reduced sea ice may have affected their food supply.
Craney calls the changes “horrifying.” “It keeps me up at night,” she said. “I know I’m not the only one dealing with the mental overload of it.”
When Craney first heard of “solastalgia,” a word coined by Australian philosopher to mean existential distress caused by climate change, she thought ‘I have that!’ “I didn’t know I needed a word, but it helps,” she said.
In 2017, Craney was interviewed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change through an initiative to make the topic more accessible and understandable. She has completed artist residencies in Iceland, at Denali National Park (where she’s returning this summer) and in the Inside Passage on board Sea Wolf Adventures, a Glacier Bay cruise company.
The purpose of her work is to encourage awareness and mourn the losses of irreversible impact on the environment.
“(I want to) encourage awareness that we are human and humans fail and we’re failing big time,” she said. “Through writing about my work, I try to talk about that. But then it’s also coping at the same time.”
In her latest exhibit “Landfalls,” on display in Fairbanks, Craney curated excerpts from female Alaskan writers on their changing climate to accompany her art.
The series features 15 women, including excerpts from Nancy Lord’s novel, pH, about ocean acidification and phytoplankton, poetry by Vivian Faith Prescott, and a quote from New York Times essayist Laureli Ivanhoff.
“I could see that it was responding to my words in a non-literal way,” Lord said. “Art has such a great potential for influencing people, and is sometimes more helpful than words. People can respond emotionally as well as intellectually.”
Ivanhoff ,who wrote “The Bearded Seal My Son May Never Hunt” The New York Times published in 2018, said she thought Craney’s work is brilliant. Her reaction to seeing Craney’s work was visceral, she said, similarly to realizing her young son will likely never hunt seal as his ancestors have in Unalakleet.
“I immediately am drawn to the photo of the ice,” Ivanhoff said of the six-plate piece Craney created based off her words. “This past year, we had zero ice cover on our ocean. Growing up, the ice would start forming in October and would be here sometimes until June.”
Ivanhoff said that reading is one thing, but seeing is another.
“We can read The New York Times and the Anchorage Daily News and get on with our day,” she said. “But when individuals have the time to see a visual piece and reflect on the words, I think that’s really special and important. I hope people feel what we are feeling out here because there are some drastic changes that are taking place.
The name of the piece has a dual meaning, Craney explained on Instagram.
“A few folks have asked why I titled my series of dedications as ‘Landfalls.’ Here’s a brief answer: just when you think you’ve arrived safely, the ground underneath you heaves, buckles, redirects, and sometimes altogether disappears. It’s disorienting and something I’ve personally experienced over and over, as many of the women in this series have-some more metaphorically than physically, though our climate crisis has taken over the wheel and is wreaking havoc on the actual ground that carries our weight. The plural use of the word implies the repetitive nature of our survival. We stand back up, dust ourselves off, and keep going.”
Craney believes her role as an artist is not to reverse course-“it’s too late for that”-but to “pay homage of what it is like to be human in the 21st century.”
“Art is not a solution to the troublesome problem, rather, it offers a type of solace in a world wrought with unpredictability,” she wrote in her conclusion. “Art offers viewers a chance to reflect on the world as they know it and see a different perspective through an artist’s interpretation.”