Book Review — The Arctic as remembered by Sandra M. Hawkins
Maureen Korp
Faraway places? Lands you’ve travelled to, or hope to see one day? Hardcover photography books about those places are ones you’d surely reach for on any table. Two books by Ottawa lens-based artist Sandra M. Hawkins are well worth opening.
Sandra M. Hawkins has travelled several times to the Arctic circle and recently self-published two books about these journeys. Their accounts are not “selfies” of her travels, nor are they documentaries. In the pages of each, photographic imagery opens our eyes to shifts in memory, of winds and water, of peoples from here to there.
Sailing the Top of the World: Climate Change in the High Arctic, 2021, 30 pp, is a beautifully formatted account of the Arctic Circle 2019 Arts & Sciences Expedition, the international artists residency experienced by Hawkins over summer solstice. For three weeks, she was one of 43 people aboard the tall ship Antigua, sailing into the Svalbard Archipelago near Norway. Everyone helped with the sailing, and everyone helped one another. There was a mini-workshop on Cyanotype printing techniques using saltwater and ultraviolet rays. Nightly, artists and scientists shared thoughts and spoke of their work together.
The photographs we see in Sailing the Top of the World are sharp-edged with clear, bright colours, and well-composed, each one informatively captioned. On page 5, for example, we see a truly big, most unusual rock formation. Named Longyearbyen, it stands verti ally ridged, ordered like a troop of soldiers against sky and water. The caption tells us its “unique geological formations [are] comprised of horizontal layers of sedimentary rocks.” Are seawaters rising?
On page 7, we read of Black-legged Kittiwake chicks and their springtime rite of passage. A fox awaits their flight.
Were there ever people here? Yes. On page 17, we see a photograph of an orange shack built in 1912 at the water’s edge of Möllerfjorden. This is Lloyds Hotel. No, it is not available for overnight stays.
The pages of Sailing the Top of the World are ones to ponder. On page 21, we read that the sea ice could be gone by 2035. The beauty of this not-so-faraway land will not be there tomorrow.
Global Forces, Intimate Spaces, Intersecting Landscapes, 2024, 100 pp, documents the lasting importance of another Arctic journey, one undertaken back in 1981 by the artist. The book is in four parts. “Part I —Arctic Crisis” is a series of 16 photomontages. Surprisingly clear photographs of Inuit communities from 1981 are overlaid onto faded photographs of New York City in 1997. How did these come to be? Was the artist walking the streets of Manhattan, looking at skyscrapers but remembering Kugluktuk, Ulukhaktok or that big Taloyoak oil reservoir up north? It looks that way.
In “Part 2 —Ecology of Narrative Space,” the artist looks again at her 1981 photographs of Inuit communities, this time in the context of a journal she kept while up north. Her notes are faded, illegible. These half-formed thoughts become the background for evocative photomontages of the Arctic lands. Today, this is self-governing Nunavut.
Parts 3 and 4 document subsequent performances and international exhibitions of the artist’s work. Global Forces might well be seen as a catalogue raisonné of her Arctic memories. Remember. It matters.
For further information, visit www.SandraHawkins.ca or contact the artist directly at shawkins@rogers.com.
