Language Erratics, 2022 - 2024
In Language Erratics, Hannah Larrabee and Jacinda Russell explore a phenomenon of language that parallels the evolving Arctic landscape: the severing of words from what they mean in a warming world. In the poem “Arctic: Scenic Vista,” Larrabee writes: “I am trying / to only draw lines / with words,” and Russell re-envisions these words as lines in a photograph, breaking fragments apart and watching them slowly disappear with ice. This correspondence between poetry and photography engages the long history of ekphrastic art, with Russell’s visual compositions inspired by Larrabee’s poems about their experience during The Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard in 2022.
Russell responded to thirteen of the poems, freezing imagery, text, moss, and stones, then photographing them melting on top of significant backdrops. The temporality of the ice and the unpredictable nature of its dissipation adds to the erratic quality of each composition. As the collaboration progressed, the visual cues and responses journeyed further from the poems and Russell’s final response is only distant and tenuous – emulating erratics in New England woods … worlds away from the glacier that deposited them. In this sense, language and meaning become distorted, challenged by acceleration and the long cycle of geologic time, as they try to articulate this rapidly changing world.
