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
