Summer’s End is an Arctic intermedia installation and visual experience.

It is a 22-minute, three-channel multisensory, multi-disciplinary work that transforms captured artistic responses into an immersive experience of mourning, reflection, and ecological awakening. Through a curation of Arctic visualisations, original poetry, and a bespoke composition, the project bridges the gap between empirical understanding and emotional comprehension of climate disruption. It forges new and deep connections to the sublime environment of the Arctic, activating audiences with a sustained desire to preserve this crucial ecosystem.

This project is supported by Micro Galleries.

In August 2024, NASA satellite images revealed Svalbard was melting five times faster than normal, with ice caps breaking daily surface melt records. These high temperatures lead to the much stronger melting of glaciers, which could gradually lead to their disappearance in the future. Such cataclysmic changes threaten not just the physical landscape but the delicate ecosystems and cultural significance of one of Earth's last wild places.

While scientific data captures the measurable changes, there is an urgent need to communicate the profound emotional and experiential dimensions of this loss. Several new terms for climate change-induced distress such as such as climate anxiety, solastalgia, and eco-grief have been introduced to describe the long-term emotional consequences of anticipated or actual environmental changes, with ecological grief as a prime example.

Our link to the polar region is fractured, and this project contributes to the processing of that loss and grief, the reforging of a powerful, deep respect and connection to an iconic and symbolic natural area, and - through the forging of this connection - the motivation to preserve this vital part of our ecosystem.

When these sublime landscapes transform or disappear, we lose more than physical terrain—we lose portals of understanding that connect us to planetary processes larger than human experience.

Summer's End explores the sublime terrain of The Arctic Circle and provides an immersive meditation on disappearance and ecological awakening.

August in the High Arctic is when summer has peaked. The ice has retreated, and small flowers spot the barren hillsides. It is the season of constant light, and the approaching sunsets are harbingers of the dark winter that lies ahead. This gallery performance includes three-channel video projection, ten poems, and fifteen minutes of solo piano music, either live or recorded. Summer’s End is a meditation on a vanishing world, a change of season, loss, and grief. 

This collaboration marks Kat, Rachel, and Alan's return to Svalbard with the 2024 Arctic Circle Residency Alumni expedition. All three artists first met on their residency over the summer solstice in 2018. Text, images and videos were generated on location as the three artists circumnavigated the archipelago onboard the expedition vessel MV Ortelius. Nathan will respond to and interweave the content with sound response informed by the visuals, text and his three-month residency with the Arctic Culture Lab in Ilulissat, Kalaallit Nunaat, Greenland.