How do you make a cyanotype that is over 2 metres wide? Elizabeth Bourne broke her photograph of the Eqi Glacier into 200 individual sections, creating a tiled paper negative. She carefully numbered, printed, exposed, and assembled each piece to create one huge cyanotype measuring 209 × 109 cm. Using seal blubber oil, glacial runoff, and the Arctic midnight sun, she also found a way to connect the materials and landscape of Svalbard with Greenland.
In early 2024, I began planning the final exhibition in my three-part Glacial Narratives series, exploring different aspects of climate change. This exhibition would focus on Greenland and would open first in Ilulissat in September 2024.
The choice of subject came easily. In 2023, I had spent an afternoon in a small dinghy in front of the Eqi glacier (Eqip Sermia), listening as the ice rumbled, boomed and calved into the water. The Eqi is the most active ice front in Greenland, and the experience was extraordinary enough to make the decision for me.
“At the time, I was in my seventh year of living on Svalbard. I wanted the work to speak not only about Greenland’s experience of climate change, but also about the connection between Greenland and Svalbard as two high Arctic lands.”
Building the image from Arctic materials
I chose cyanotype because I knew from experience that I could make good cyanotypes with the limited materials available to me on Svalbard. To take the connection between Svalbard and Greenland further, I decided to make materiality the foundation of the Eqi Glacier.
I decided to render seal blubber to make oil for the paper negatives transparent. The blubber was given to me by a local hunter — and there was a lot of it. It was surprisingly easy to render down into oil at a low, constant heat on my stovetop.
During the spring, I made a series of tests. I first tested the image at a smaller size to make sure I had a good-quality negative. I then began thinking about the size of the rooms where the finished piece would be shown.
I wanted the glacier to fill the room, so that when people entered they would have something of the same feeling of awe that I had experienced seeing it in person. That meant making the image large.
A glacier in pieces
The only practical way for me to make such a large image was to construct it in pieces, almost like a puzzle. After experimenting with different tile sizes, I settled on 20 square tiles across and 10 tiles down. Each tile was 10 cm (4 inches) across, with a 1 cm gap between the tiles. The final image would measure 209 x 109 cm (6.5 x 3.5 ft).
My original photograph was taken with a Canon R6 and had plenty of pixels to work with. I enlarged it in Photoshop to 200 x 100 cm, then used the slice tool to divide it into 200 square sections.
I created pages containing two negatives each, with their number and position labelled underneath. The top row was A1 through A20, the next B1 through B20, continuing through to the final row, J1 through J20.
Once they were printed, I laid all the negatives out on the floor to check that I had not made any mistakes in the labelling, missed any pieces, or somehow lost the overall image in the process. A few had to be reprinted. It was surprisingly easy to get them out of order.
It was extremely important not to lose track of where each tile belonged. Every time I cut a negative out, I immediately paired it with the coated sheet it would be exposed on and wrote the placement number on the back.
Printing under the midnight sun
By May, Svalbard had entered the period of midnight sun, and it was time to put the rest of the plan into action.
I collected buckets of water from the Longyear River, which is fed by glacial runoff from the Longyear glacier, to wash the final prints. After carrying out additional exposure tests — the strength of the Arctic summer sun is extraordinary — I exposed four negatives at a time on D’Arches hot-press watercolour paper.
The final exposure time was just 3 minutes and 30 seconds. I then washed the prints in glacier runoff, completing the foundational idea of keeping the materiality of the work connected to what could be done in Greenland.
We are both lands of seal hunting, midnight sun and glaciers.
Once I had a complete set, carefully cut out, I mounted the tiles on the studio wall to see whether any needed to be remade. About ten pieces had to be re-exposed because their colours were too far off, and two negatives that I had cut badly had to be reprinted.
At this point, I was particularly pleased that all 200 pieces were finally in the right order.
Finding a way to transport the glacier
The finished piece would travel to exhibitions in countries with very different climates, from the dry conditions of Svalbard and Greenland to the maritime damp of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides. I therefore needed a way to mount each piece that would keep it flat while also making the entire work practical to transport and install.
My artist friend Lena Von Goedeke offered me a place to stay in Berlin and took me shopping for the materials I needed. We discussed the mounting problem with her studio assistant and agreed that the best solution was to mount each tile onto a sturdy board and attach a strip of magnetic tape to the back.
We would then need 200 magnets, plus a few spares, fitted onto standard flat-head screws. The tiles could be attached to the screws magnetically.
I had brought some test tiles with me. We bought the materials at an art supply shop and made a prototype. The idea worked perfectly. Lena’s assistant also graciously volunteered to cut the boards to tile size, allowing me to pack them easily into my suitcase. Taking full-sized boards on a plane would obviously have been impossible.
200 pieces, one glacier
Back on Svalbard, I began glueing the tiles to the boards and attaching the magnetic tape in the same location on the back of each one.
Because everyone had been so careful throughout the process — from cutting the A3 paper negatives, to cutting the cyanotype tiles, to cutting the mounting boards — almost all 200 pieces fitted together perfectly. Only one tile had to be remade.
Again, it was essential to write the tile location on the back of every board. With 200 nearly identical pieces, there was no room for guesswork.
The real test: Greenland
The real test was whether the system would work in Greenland. I travelled to Ilulissat at the beginning of September to assist with the installation.
Andreas Hoffman, the director of the Art Museum of Ilulissat, initially thought the piece would go together easily. But because the museum is housed in a historic building, he decided to first mount a large piece of plywood, paint it white, and mark out the complete grid showing where the tiles and screws should go.
Interestingly, the painted and gridded plywood already looked like an artwork in its own right. Once the screws were in place, I erased the lines.
It took two days to put the whole system together. Once the plywood was attached to the wall, I simply snapped the cyanotype tiles into position. It worked beautifully.
A glacier that cannot be put back together
The final part of the work is deliberately interactive. One of the museum staff chooses ten tiles to remove from the completed image. One tile is placed on the museum desk, while the other nine are laid out with a sign inviting visitors to put the puzzle back together.
But one piece will always be missing.
The glacier cannot be put back together.
The piece subsequently travelled to Taigh Chearsabagh in Uist, Patriot Hall Gallery in Edinburgh, and An Talla Solais in Ullapool. It can be installed in half a day if the screws are drilled directly into the wall, fits into a shoebox for transport, and weighs less than 2 kilos.
It is now back in Ilulissat, where it has become part of the museum’s permanent collection — which is where I believe it belongs.
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