Thomas Seear-Budd
Thomas Seear-Budd is a New Zealand visual artist fascinated by the world’s isolated, fragile and changing landscapes. Thomas’s recent body of photographic work studies the powerful presence of Sermersuaq, Greenland’s deteriorating ice sheet, one of the world’s last empty places and truly sublime landscapes.
Despite its remoteness Sermersuaq has become arguably the fastest warming landscape on the planet, as impacted by our actions and resulting changing climate. The second largest body of ice in the world after the Antarctic ice sheet, Sermersuaq covers 80 percent of Greenland’s surface and extends up to 4 kilometers deep in some places. With the acceleration of glacial melt at its edges, Sermersuaq is losing 200 billion tons of ice per year, contributing twice as much as the Antarctic to rising sea levels.
On a recent expedition to the Arctic Thomas’s work focuses on the immense retreat and melting of the ice sheet’s Western edge where a new black, rocky desertscape is expanding as the ice creaks, groans and disintegrates. Thomas’s resulting abstract photographic explorations reveal the dynamic, sublime and enigmatic qualities of Sermersuaq, inviting the viewer to contemplate their own relationship with this isolated, fragile and ephemeral icescape.
Images courtesy of Thomas Seear-Budd
www.thomasseearbudd.com
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