Work from Simon Norfolk’s series ‘Shroud’, 2018, is currently on view in the exhibition ‘Something Blue’ Jan 21 – April 12, 2025 at The Gund at Kenyon College.
Made in collaboration with Klaus Thymann of Project Pressure, “a charity with a mission to visualize climate change,” Norfolk’s ‘Shroud’ photographs depict efforts to enshroud and save part of the Rhône Glacier in Switzerland. Known as a tourist attraction, and featuring a man-made ice grotto, the glacier has been covered in blankets to forestall further melting. Norfolk and Thymann collaborated on a unique helium balloon to light the glacier’s covering, resulting in images that evoke the iconography of lamentation as a means to represent climate change.
The exhibition “Something Blue” brings together a diverse group of contemporary artists— Spencer Finch, Manami Ishimura, Pierre Huyghe, Peggy Weil, Iris Haussler, Douglas Coupland, and others—to examine the iceberg as both material and metaphor. Inspired by research from the lab of Kenyon faculty member Dr. Ruth Heindel, this exhibition seeks to portray aspects of the physical world that are beyond human comprehension, using, for example, the phenomenon of blue ice—a striking visual occurrence caused by centuries of compressed ice—to frame a meditation on the slow, inexorable changes that are reshaping our planet.
Read more about this exhibition here.
Image: Simon Norfolk, Shroud 9, 2018