The melting of the Swiss glaciers is changing the beautiful images of the Swiss Alps
The Roseg glacier in Engadin is among the less than 0.1% of the Earth’s glaciers that are located in Europe, South America, Africa, New Zealand, and Irian Jaya.
Swiss Ice Beauties Vanishing
A research, published in 2019 by ETH Zurich, says that 2/3rd of the ice in the glaciers of the Swiss Alps is doomed to melt by the end of the century due to climate change.
In turn, the decreasing Roseg glacier meltwaters that flow into the river Inn and further on to Austria, the Danube river and the Black Sea, lessen water availability for millions of people and hydroelectric power plants.
The art project “Vanishing Swiss Ice Beauties”
The art project “Vanishing Swiss Ice Beauties” is about the outstanding aesthetic shapes, colours and forms of the Swiss glaciers that have carved some of Switzerland’s most beautiful landscapes by steepening and deepening valleys through erosion.
The art project’s first pigment print series is of the Roseg glacier in the beautifully ice eroded landscape of Val Roseg.
The Roseg glacier and the Val Roseg landscape are painted with real stone pigments. This allows light to pass through the pigments to resemble how light passes through ice crystals. The real stone pigments also give the surface fine cracks that remind of the unique and fragile ice crystals. All pigments are mixed by hand.
The pigment paintings are pigment printed. Pigment printing is a technique where the image is printed by the use of pigments only, and the craquelure, colour intensity and luminance of the pigments in the painting is kept when transferred to paper.
The Val Roseg pigment prints will be published in 2021.
See the beautiful Val Roseg from a drone late December 2020.
(Film by Lukas Bühlmann. Editing by Leonardo Krog Dedichen)