Jaanika Peerna, I could hear the inner workings of ice, 2024-2025, color pencil on mylar, 11 x 9 “
January 22 – March 7, 2026 – Patrick Heide Contemporary Art – 11 Church Street, London NW8 8EE, UK
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12–5 PM
Think About Water member Jaanika Peerna brings her urgent Glacier Elegy project to London in the group exhibition As Long As It Takes: Drawing and Performance, alongside artists Peter Matthews, Carali McCall, and Diogo Pimentão.
Within this exhibition, drawing emerges from bodies in motion—circling graphite lines to exhaustion, responding to melting glaciers, creating marks through sustained, performative actions. For Peerna, the line becomes a process shaped by duration, recording effort, vulnerability, and attention to the natural world’s most fragile elements.
Peerna presents her series I Could Hear the Internal Workings of the Ice, created while listening to soundscapes of ice melting, shifting, and breaking. Drawing instinctively with both hands, she responds to these recordings as if transcribing sound into movement, producing energetic marks that reflect deep immersion in the experience. The drawings act as intuitive chronicles of her emotional and physical response to vanishing glaciers.
Her wall sculptures serve as memorials for glaciers that no longer exist—physical manifestations of loss, memory, and the interconnected systems that bind water in all its forms. Through direct physical and sensory engagement with ice and sound, Peerna transforms ephemeral environmental phenomena into visceral visual form, making visible what is disappearing from our world.
The resulting works are not only images or objects, but traces of lived actions marked by movement, resistance, and environmental conditions—a practice that honors water as life force, sacred element, and threatened presence.
As Long As It Takes was recently featured in The Guardian
Jaanika Peerna, Muir (Vanishing Glacier Memorials series), 2025, pigment print, pigment pencil, color pencil on hand cut mylar, 180 x 35 x 15 cm