Art Meets Science in Iceland’s Westfjords

Local environmental change in a global context

Human activity is driving many changes in the global environment—from climate change and biodiversity loss to pollution and resource overuse. Because of these changes, the Earth System has entered an era of human-driven instability, often referred to as the “Anthropocene”. Global environmental changes have particularly strong impacts on the Arctic, where the atmosphere is warming much faster than the global average, sea ice is shrinking, habitats are being lost, species distributions are shifting, and persistent pollutants are accumulating. In a warming Arctic, greater accessibility is driving the expansion of human activities in the region, including tourism, shipping, and aquaculture, which add further pressure on the environment.

Arctic environmental change is mostly due to externalities of human activities outside the region, yet it most directly affects people in the region. Some changes create new economic opportunities. Many changes, however, threaten Arctic communities and traditional lifestyles. This forces Arctic societies to adapt—a challenge that many societies around the globe are set to encounter as climate change is accelerating.

Understanding change through arts and sciences

Scientists often seek to capture and communicate environmental change in numbers and graphs. One example is global temperature increases and the internationally agreed target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. Other examples are charts of annual ocean surface temperatures that show unprecedented levels of warming. Of course, such information is crucial to assess, in depth, the magnitude, speed, and impacts of changes and to inform decision-making. However, it is not sufficient for appreciating environmental changes and their societal repercussions holistically.

Art-science collaborations offer a valuable avenue for making sense of environmental change. A well-known example, and a source of inspiration for our project, is the Feral Atlas. The digital atlas explores the Anthropocene through field reports from scientists, humanists, and artists that focus on the entanglement of nonhuman entities with human infrastructure. Another source of inspiration was the compendium Wayfinding in the Westfjords. It weaves together local, experiential, and scientific knowledge as well as different forms of artistic expression around the theme of sustainable traveling on old trails. These two examples indicate how broad the spectrum of transdisciplinary art-science collaborations can be.

Working with objects and words in the Westfjords

Our own project combined visual arts and social sciences to investigate what roles science can play in the pursuit of resilient human-environment relations. We explored this theme in the Westfjords, a sparsely populated peninsula in the Northwest of Iceland. Each of us received a Grímsson fellowship for a one-month stay in Ísafjörður. As the region’s capital, the town also hosts a small university center that became our local anchor point.

House of Grímur in Ísafjörður, where former President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson grew up, was the base for our art-science project.

We approached the role of science through five hand-drawn natural objects, each of which represents a bundle of place-based research activities in the Westfjords. The people who suggested these objects told us different stories about what science can contribute to thriving human-environment relations. We then transformed the five objects into three new images on how science can help navigate human-driven environmental change. The visual essay that summarizes our results has been published as an online exposition on Research Catalogue, an international platform for artistic research.

Our transdisciplinary project had three phases. First, we interviewed researchers and other societal actors in the Westfjords and collected objects they suggested. Second, we zoomed into the structures of these objects through visual illustration and zoomed out to identify general patterns of research activities through social science reflections. Third, we entered into a conversation that linked these patterns to three roles of science, each illustrated with an image made of building blocks from the five natural objects. In the following, we describe how the two of us perceived this process from the perspective of a visual artist (Elisa Debora Hofmann) and a social scientist (Benjamin Hofmann).

The perspective of a social scientist

In the first phase, I conducted interviews with local and international scientists who do research in the Westfjords. My aim was to get an overview of research activities that relate to environmental changes. In the interviews, I learned that most research in the region, in one way or another, addressed such changes, especially climate change and natural resource use. I also discovered that researchers cultivated a strong engagement of the local community. A challenge for me was to select which research activities to focus on, as the list quickly became too long. Selecting research activities also according to an object the artist found visually interesting was a refreshing solution.

Fieldwork impression from Nesströnd where bays are full of driftwood from Siberia.
Fieldwork impression from Ísafjörður where the University Centre of the Westfjords monitors invasive Atlantic rock crabs.

In the second phase, my main activity was to connect insights from the interviews to existing scholarly literature. The goal was to identify certain patterns of research activities that could describe different roles of science in relation to environmental change. I had a draft typology of roles derived from inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability sciences before coming to Iceland. The research activities covered in the interviews provided rich material to illustrate this typology with examples but also made me rethink some of my preliminary ideas. Continued conversation with the artist helped me to take a step back from my own perspective as well as to interpret the interview material and select from it.

In the third phase, I revised and refined my typology of the roles of science. Specifically, I distinguished its societal roles in terms of understanding, deliberating, and responding to environmental changes. For each of these roles, I summarized tasks that science could accomplish and provided examples from research in the Westfjords. At this stage, finding suitable terminology for the different roles and tasks of science was a challenge. Working with the artist on how to interpret these roles visually was instrumental in critically questioning and sharpening the typology of roles.

The perspective of a visual artist

The initial step was to find the objects our interviewees had suggested. Before going out, I categorized potential objects according to their appearance, haptics, and animate/inanimate nature. From this list, I selected five very different objects related to the research activities we wanted to focus on. I then searched for the objects on land and on the shores of the Westfjords, sometimes with the help of the people we interviewed. Often, I had to choose from several objects of the same kind, such as from the driftwood that piled up in small bays or the many basalt stones on the bottom of huge avalanche protection walls. My selection focused on aesthetic objects with very recognizable characteristics.

The next step was to visualize the five selected objects. I made several sketches of each object to get closer to its character through drawing. I concentrated on the surface texture, the associated feel, and the beauty of these simple objects. In the final pencil drawing, I paid attention to the placement of the object as well as to light and shadow to emphasize its typical characteristics. One challenge was that the sugar kelp changed its appearance as soon as it was out of water, its home environment. Its shiny and mobile leaf-like structure, the so-called phylloid, became dull and stiff in the air. Photographs I had taken when removing the algae from the sea helped me reconstruct its initial appearance.

Visual study of natural objects from the Westfjords.
Illustration of Atlantic rock crab.

The last step was to compose new images about the different roles of science, using digitized building blocks from the hand-drawn illustrations. By dissecting the five nature studies into individual components, I produced a visual construction kit that served as a starting point for the illustrations of the typology. Thus, just as the scientific typology drew on the various research projects, the new illustrations emerged from the previously created visual material. The depth of the scientist’s reflections enriched my process of developing the images, facilitated an enriching dialogue about the visualization of theoretical content, and inspired the titles of the illustrations.

The potential of art-science collaboration in a changing Arctic

Our project, while limited in time and scale, points to three potentials of art-science collaborations in a changing Arctic. The first potential lies in the transdisciplinary character of such collaborations. Transdisciplinary approaches transgress the boundaries of the academic sector by engaging with civil society actors and other partners in society. They promise to make visible various types of knowledge beyond the scientific evidence generated from formal and systematic procedures of inquiry. Art-science collaborations can appreciate the value of local and experiential knowledge in understanding and dealing with environmental change.

The second potential of art-science collaborations is to move beyond rationalism. While rational decision-making is a widely held ideal, slow global progress in climate change mitigation highlights its limitations in stabilizing the Earth System. Indeed, many observers argue for moving away from mere communication of facts to telling inspiring stories that relate to people’s emotions. Raising emotions, coupled with the communication of action-oriented knowledge, can spark more sustained societal action on environmental change. Art-science collaborations can speak to an audience on both cognitive and emotional levels by combining different media, such as text and images, in creative ways.

Small is beautiful: the village of Flateyri seen from its avalanche protection wall.

The third potential of collaborations involving the arts and sciences arises from their smallness. Austrian philosopher Leopold Kohr coined the term “small is beautiful”. It describes the idea that the local scale is most appropriate for human communities to become socially flourishing and environmentally sustainable. In art-science collaborations, smallness results from place-based projects in a specific local context and socio-ecological setting. A web of such art-science collaborations from different local contexts across the Arctic could foster thick and diverse interpretations of environmental and societal changes in the region.

In conclusion, collaborations of arts and sciences offer unique potentials for making sense of and navigating the environmental and societal changes the Arctic region is facing. It is an important element for engaging civil society in broader deliberations about how the Arctic could and should look like in the decades to come.

Acknowledgements: We thank our interlocutors for their engagement and all colleagues who supported us in pursuing this project. The project was made possible by the Grímsson fellowship that each of us received from Arctic Circle Foundation / Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson Centre. The fellowship is based on participation by the University of Iceland, University of Akureyri, Reykjavík University, the University Center of the Westfjords, and the biotechnology company Kerecis. The results of the art-science collaboration we describe here have been published as a digital exposition titled "Science in the Anthropocene: A transdisciplinary visual exploration in the Icelandic Westfjords".

No. 02/2025, 12 March 2025

This article is a part of the Arctic Circle Journal Series which provides insight, understanding and new information. The material represents the opinions of the author but not those of Arctic Circle.