Glacier Elegies

About 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