Ephemeral Ice / Eternal Water

Scoresby Sund, East Greenland · 2015 · developed through field travel across fjord, ice, tundra, and coastal environments


Ephemeral Ice / Eternal Water is a photographic work made during a schooner expedition through Scoresby Sund, East Greenland.


The project follows a brief human passage through a vast Arctic environment, moving between aircraft, settlement, vessel, open water and land. Moving through Scoresby Sund gradually recalibrated a sense of scale, as human movement and duration became increasingly difficult to measure against ice, water, and geological space.


Rather than treating the landscape as backdrop, the photographs attend to the changing conditions of encounter: distance, proximity, movement, weather, scale and the temporary presence of the traveller within a place that continues far beyond them.

Three people in a small inflatable boat pass an immense blue iceberg in the calm turquoise waters of Scoresby Sund, East Greenland.

The journey began through systems of transit and orientation.


Planes, boats, maps, windows, decks and navigation instruments provided temporary structures through which the landscape could be approached and understood.


They offered a sense of direction, but also made visible the limits of that control.


As the expedition moved deeper into the fjords, those human frameworks became increasingly slight against the scale of the surrounding terrain.

Snow-covered mountains seen through the rounded window of a small aircraft flying over East Greenland.
Ittoqqortoormiit, one of Greenland’s most remote towns, seen beyond sea ice near the entrance to Scoresby Sund in northeast Greenland.
A wooden ship’s wheel at the helm of a sailing vessel, framed by the windows and instruments of the wheelhouse. The Donna Wood North Star Sailing
A two-masted schooner among scattered ice floes on calm water beneath a pink and purple Arctic sky. The opal
A distant schooner the opal crosses a calm Arctic fjord beneath dramatic layered clouds and snow-covered mountains.
Fractured blue-white icebergs stretch across calm water beneath low grey clouds in Scoresby Sund, East Greenland. A small Zodiac passes between them

Ice first appeared at a distance as architecture: monumental, isolated, almost immovable.


Closer encounters complicated that impression.


Surfaces revealed fracture, sediment, translucency, submerged edges and forms shaped by continual exposure to water and weather. What had seemed singular and stable became visibly temporary.


A monumental blue-white iceberg with a large arched opening rises from the dark waters of Scoresby Sund.
Elevated view of scattered ice floes surrounded by luminous turquoise water and warm evening light in East Greenland.
A sculpted iceberg beside vivid turquoise water and a dark rocky shoreline in Scoresby Sund.
A small sculpted iceberg drifts among countless fragments of sea ice, with distant mountains beneath a layered Arctic sky.

The work gradually shifts from spectacle toward attention.


The photographs move from vast formations to small details, from horizon to surface, from looking outward to looking closely.

At this scale, the Arctic becomes less an image of remoteness and more a field of physical evidence: erosion, melt, texture, residue and change.

Close view of layered blue and white ice reflected in water, its surface marked by flowing dark lines.
Close view of translucent blue ice containing fine cracks, suspended sediment and shifting patterns of light.

Returning to land introduced another measure of time.


Glaciers entered the frame as part of larger mountain systems. Meltwater crossed rock and tundra. Vegetation, bone and exposed ground suggested cycles occurring beyond the visible drama of the ice itself.


The landscape was no longer encountered only as something immense, but as something layered, inhabited and marked by different measures of time.

A glacier winds through a steep, dark mountain valley, its fractured blue surface crossed by bands of rock and sediment.
A glacier descends between snow-streaked mountains towards the fjord, seen through the blurred ropes and rigging of a schooner.
A narrow meltwater stream flows across green Arctic tundra towards low mountains beneath a dramatic clouded sky.
A hiker crosses rocky Arctic tundra dotted with yellow wildflowers, with patches of snow on the hills beyond.
Icebergs drift across a still fjord beyond weathered shoreline rocks as warm evening light breaks beneath dark storm clouds.
Three weathered animal vertebrae lie among dark stones on an Arctic shoreline in East Greenland.

The expedition lasted only a short time.


The photographs remain as evidence of that temporary passage: a human journey through a place that could never be fully possessed, fixed or understood within the duration of the visit.


Revisited a decade later, the archive takes on an added resonance as East Greenland continues to undergo rapid environmental change. The photographs do not function as longitudinal evidence, but as a record of one encounter with a landscape whose conditions are still shifting.


The journey ended. The landscape continues.


The rigging and netting of a schooner extend over calm water and scattered ice floes as the sun sets across Scoresby Sund.

Selected images, image sequences, and wider unpublished archive material are available for editorial, publishing, institutional, and selected commercial licensing. Please get in touch with details of the intended use, territory, duration, and image requirements for availability and a tailored quote.


The archive includes further studies of ice formations, fjord systems, glacial terrain, tundra, expedition life, and the movement between land and water.




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