TAI Bookshelf Podcast - Ecocritical Arctic Art History with Isabelle Gapp

In this month’s TAI Bookshelf podcast, Dr. Isabelle Gapp talks about ecocriticism and art history in the Arctic. Photo: Isabelle Gapp

It is 2022 and TAI Bookshelf Podcast is back with a fourth series! As always, co-hosts Liuba Timonina and Romain Chuffart chat with scholars and experts to make the Arctic easy and accessible to everyone. This year, the podcast team is joined by new and returning co-hosts Victoria Bergström and Saga Helgason. Mariel Kieval also gets onboard to help with producing the episodes behind the scenes. Tune in every month and join our in-depth conversations that take you beyond the headlines and right into the latest ideas, challenges, and experiences from the Arctic.

In this episode, Liuba and Romain have a conversation with Dr. Isabelle Gapp about ecocritical art history and Arctic landscape painting. Isabelle talked about her fascination with ice, her childhood in Sweden and her research on Swedish artist and polar researcher Anna Boberg (1864-1935). The episode explores ideas of ecocriticism in relation to art history and Anna Boberg’s glacial landscape painting at the turn of the twentieth century. We discuss women’s embodied presence and gender construction in the Arctic, materialities of art production and the need for more inclusive, collaborative initiatives to understand the path dependencies and representations of climate change in the Arctic.

Dr. Isabelle Gapp is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of York (2020). Her research considers the intersections between nineteenth and twentieth-century landscape painting, gender, environmental history, and climate change around the Circumpolar North. Isabelle is the co-lead, alongside Professor Mark A. Cheetham, of the JHI Working Group Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North (2021-ongoing) and serves as an editor for the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE). She is currently working on her first book, A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930, to be published by Lund Humphries as part of their Northern Lights series (forthcoming 2023).

References and further readings:

• Gapp, Isabelle. “A Woman in the Far North: Anna Boberg and the Norwegian Glacial Landscape.” Kunst og Kultur 104, no. 2 (2021): 82–96. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-3029-2021-02-02. 
• Gapp, Isabelle “An Arctic Impressionism: Anna Boberg and the Lofoten Islands” in Burns, Emily C., and Price Alice M Rudy (eds.) Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts. Routledge, 2021.
• Gapp, Isabelle, “Galvanizing Glaciology: Thoughts on an Ecocritical Art History” Environmental History Now (20 January 2022) https://envhistnow.com/2022/01/20/galvanizing-glaciology-thoughts-on-an-ecocritical-art-history/
• Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. University of British Columbia Press, 2006.

This episode was recorded in January 2022.