3029-0279 Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture 3029-0279 Open Library of Humanities 10.16995/regeneration.20338 Article Loss and Reflection Zlanabitnig Drea drea.zlanabitnig@gmail.com 1 Chisholm Dianne chisholm@ualberta.ca 2 Legge Andrea andreadlegge@gmail.com 1 Larrabee Hannah hrlarrabee@gmail.com 3 Lockhart Alexandra aelock12@gmail.com 4 Artist Writer, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alberta Poet – University of New Hampshire, MFA Dancer, Choreographer 17 02 2026 2026 2 1-2 1 11 Copyright: © 2026 The Author(s) 2026 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

A multimodal collaboration between artists, writers, and scholars. This piece emerged from an expedition to the Arctic archipelago as part of the Arctic Circle Residency in Autumn 2022.

 Untitled (Esmarkbreen), 2022

Drea Zlanabitnig

Untitled (Esmarkbreen), 2022

The artist declares they have no competing interests.

 Farthest North

Dianne Chisholm

i

This far north the nearest ice lies south.

 ii

Motor all night from Fairhaven in northeastern Spitsbergen to Chermsideøya, an island north of Nordaustlandet, Northeastlands. Two-hundred kilometres as the fulmar flies. We bank on strong westerlies for sailing back. Crossing 80th parallel, we sight Sjuøyane, Seven Islands, Svalbard’s northernmost islands. S records our farthest north in magic numbers –

80°32’07”N; 19°53’04”E

How near we are to the fabled North Pole! Just two days’ sail on ice-free seas.

(That all-too-soon will be.) (But what is the North . . . without ice?)

 iii

We read of Nansen, Amundsen, Nobile. The Great Race for the Pole. Setting off, coming short, crashing catastrophically off-course in the North’s “vast frozen wastes.” But our idea of North eludes consensus. Like Glenn Gould’s northbound voyagers, we voice a polyphony of attitudes towards legendary latitudes. With degrees of irony. H regales us with tales of how manly explorer fraternities endured polar night with frilly cross-dressing follies. D shares her plans to stage “overwintering theatricals”–with clowns for “explorers” set in shipping-container “ships” left “stranded” in Battery Park for public revaluation.

The further north we go the more ideas we shed. Embrace instead the elemental presence of what lies before us: ice-aged rock. Billion-year-old gneisses and granites, heaped by Caledonian orogeny into glacier-ground, desert-island mountains. We scrabble up Søre Castréøya’s lichen-painted, moss-garnished boulders (gnarly going for me, in someone else’s too-large boots). Every stone a stepping-stone to summit-vista of rocky elsewheres: Sjuøyane’s craggy outcrops, Vestfonna’s peak-pocked, mainland icecap on opposite horizon.

 iv

Our island shingle shores a whale skull. Plus boundless scads of trash. Plastic doll, plastic ball floats, plastic bottles of all sorts, torn sheets of plastic. Plastic multi-colored shards pebble a toxic mosaic. We take up garbage-collecting as our post-heroic mission. Glean matériel for artistic reclamation. V renders “Sundry Articles Found” in polyphonic hymns to oceanic gyres, gives minor voice to historic grand monologues. D salvages ball floats to re-function as props in her forthcoming installation-deconstruction of explorer celebrity.

What we make of farthest North:

not a conquerable wasteland but a refuse assemblage.

Note

Nansen’s memoir, Farthest North, 1897, chronicles efforts to reach the farthest north on record (86°13.6’ N). Chermsideøya (Chermside Island), after Herbert C., logkeeper of Leigh Smith’s 1873 expedition. Norway’s Roald Amundsen was first to fly over the North Pole in a race against Italy’s Umberto Nobile, whose zeppelin crashed on sea ice east of Nordaustlandet. Gould’s radio documentary The Idea of North experiments with polyphonic travelogue. Søre Castréøya (South Castré Island) is in southeast Nordaustlandet. Vestfonna is Nordaustlandet’s western icecap.

The author declares they have no competing interests.

 Subjective Heroism 04, 05, 06

Andrea Legge

Subjective Heroism 04. Andrea Legge 2023

Photogrammetric 3D model still of SV Antigua and environment including camera POV data interpreted by handheld iPhone and Agisoft Metashape. Created October 10, 2022, at Liefdefjorden, Hornbaekpollen, Svalbard. Special thanks to The Arctic Circle Residency Program and The Canada Council for the Arts.

Subjective Heroism 05. Andrea Legge 2023

Photogrammetric 3D model still of SV Antigua under sail and environment including camera POV data interpreted by handheld iPhone and Agisoft Metashape. Created October 15, 2022, at Isafjorden, Templefjorden, Svalbard. Special thanks to The Arctic Circle Residency Program and The Canada Council for the Arts.

Subjective Heroism 06. Andrea Legge 2023

Photogrammetric 3D model (point cloud) still of SV Antigua under sail including camera POV data interpreted by handheld iPhone and Agisoft Metashape. Created October 15, 2022, at Isafjorden, Templefjorden, Svalbard. Special thanks to The Arctic Circle Residency Program and The Canada Council for the Arts.

The author declares they have no competing interests.

 Arctic: Chicxulub Asteroid

Hannah Larrabee

I kept thinking about how I’d set up

to keep myself alive, except there were

no trees. Not related, I don’t know,

maybe related, but someone really needs

to tell me what happened when I was

young and, also, now, having sheared

off so many memories, a metal planer,

the little wood curls, my compass

made of wood. But the driftwood

in Svalbard travels hundreds of years

and once it washes ashore it misses

the sea. This is a land of movement;

at 80˚ north the moon seems stuck

in the sky but it is always orbiting

in places we can’t see. Moss makes

an eerie kind of music so I’d love

the conversation, but it is silent here,

breathing slowly. And this was once

a lush, tropical place 300 million years

before Chicxulub came in vantablack.

Now they are saying there was no tail,

no sign until it hit the atmosphere

and that’s what I mean: of all the things

I love, no warning.

January 5, 2023

Widenfjorden

Hannah Larrabee

What remains

stays there

heritage

a memory that

starves, lichen

that takes

a hundred years

to grow on grisly

oils, blubber pits

graveyards

not limited to whales,

and the thing is

I can’t think back

to what was beautiful

without stepping

over what was not,

and I was ready,

I really was,

to remember—

but what came

forward was not

the past but some

unrecognizable future,

I don’t know why

I was in Svalbard

but I came back

and nothing

was the same,

I had mistaken it,

my life, and

when our ship

sheltered in

Widenfjorden,

I think it was there

between its long

mountainous fingers

that I confused

the horizon

for a place

and not a feeling,

a feeling I couldn’t

set down,

all I could do

was sleep

and count the ice

knocking

on the steel hull

like a code,

it said I came here

never to come back,

within me

a crack

that could

cleave great

glacial pillars,

I am afraid

that what arrived

was the real

pain, nautical

miles of it,

this place

like a person

a heartbreak

I never saw

coming.

September 6, 2023

The author declares they have no competing interests.

 Impermanence

Alexandra Lockhart

Permanence of the Impermanent

You are strewn about the land, you’re in the birds flying, you’ve landed here.

Microscopic bits of you floating, settling in a place they don’t belong.

This place they don’t relate to, only impose upon.

You are on the shorelines, deeply ingrained with the sand.

You’ve woven yourself around the Reindeer’s antlers, entangled.

Your hopes and dreams are flying here too, in imagined untouched space.

You projected your visions dancing wild, in crisp clean air, not near.

Oh, but oh! remember, much more than your romantic fantasy is here.

©2022, Alexandra Lockhart. All Rights Reserved.

Self portrait. Svalbard, Norway. 2022.

©2022, Alexandra Lockhart. All Rights Reserved.

The author declares they have no competing interests.