The Art of the Arctic: Bloomfield Resident Travels to North Pole Sea

To better understand her body, Bloomfield artist Amanda Thackray is journeying to a far end of the earth.

Thackray recently won a slot in the Arctic Circle Residency, where she and other artists and scientists will sail around the Arctic Circle for two weeks on a Barkantine tallship. The June expedition starts from the Svalbard Archipelago and will bring the ship within ten degrees of the North Pole.

As the ship travels the perimeter of the sea ice, Thackray will join with other artists and scientists in braving and studying the elements.

“Everybody is going to be working on their own projects,” Thackray said. “Hopefully there will be a lot of collaboration and people interested in building friendships and working together.”

She plans on focusing most of her attention on the ship, though; specifically the rigging.  Thackray’s art is concerned with the human body and its relationship with the natural world. Following an offhand joke by a fellow student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Thackray became fascinated with her muscles and how patterns in muscles are mirrored in nature in human-made things.

“I know how the body works, but it doesn’t make sense to me,” Thackray said.  It seems magic and surreal.”

In one of her past projects, she used her printmaking skills to create a series of patterned paper pieces that are arranged into small glass vials to appear to be muscle tissue. Her Bloomfield studio is cluttered with her sketches of finely detailed patterns as well as the materials that have inspired her.

Rope and yarn, she said, display a “cellular” pattern. She is using the arctic voyage to study the ship’s rigging to inform her sculptures and printmaking.

“It’s the musculature of the boats,” Thackray said, noting that the rigging causes the ships to move much in the way that a person’s muscles propel the skeleton."

The temperature in the Svalbard Archipelago is going to be in the low 20s and in 24 hour daylight during her summer expedition. Thackray said that despite the chill and the glare, she said is looking forward to travelling around the Arctic Circle as a potentially meditative experience.

"I really hope for a sort of crispness and freshness in atmosphere," she said. "I envision the Arctic as being a very sort of sharp, stripped down environment."

She said that she believes it is probably difficult to be prepared for the sensory experience of the trip.

"I have never spent much time on boats, and I haven’t traveled overseas in many years," she said. "However, the anxiety of the unknown is definitely eclipsed by excitement and determination. I am so excited to participate in an expedition that will provide me with this incredibly unique experience."

For more information on Thackray, the Arctic Circle project and to make tax deductible donations for her residency, visit her USA Project website. http://www.usaprojects.org/project/arctic_circle_expedition