EXHIBITION: The Mountains Between Us, FRIEZE No 9 Cork St

April 2024, FRIEZE No. 9 Cork Street Gallery, London

Hosted in support of the environmental law charity ClientEarth, and sponsored by Tekla.

Weaving together photography, video and sculptural objects, lena_c_emery highlights the accelerated loss of mountain glaciers and the desperate conservation efforts currently employed to impede their decline. Under the continued influence of greenhouse-gas forced global warming, ice that took centuries to develop is vanishing in just a number of years. A fate experts predict for at least two-thirds of all glaciers by the end of this century. EMERY: In ‘The Mountains Between Us’, I capture the current environmental efforts undertaken to reduce the rate at which glaciers melt. Glaciers have held space for centuries, silently bearing witness to history. They’ve seen the world change in ways we can barely comprehend. Because my grandfather spent his life in these mountains, watching this particular glacier retreat and form lakes where there was previously only ice and at a pace that’s steadily increasing, feels deeply personal. The idea of covering these mammoths in fabric to stall the inevitable, feels both tragic and emblematic of our relationship with nature: The magnitude of loss countered by gestures that, though earnest, feel powerless. Visually these wrapped peaks evoke images of muddied tents, makeshift shelters that we’ve come to erect for those displaced by upheaval. This fragility, their fragility, our fragility, is a direct reflection of the imbalance we have sown, where those least responsible for ecological destruction are forced to bear its heaviest burdens. The title became a way to frame those divides. Mountains have always symbolised barriers, but perhaps they could also be reimagined as thread, shared histories and a collective belonging. The elemental particles composing our very being once danced amidst these ancient landscapes and if they disappear, part of us does too.

In my work, I’m asking how we can move forward, how the mountains between us might become points of connection rather than barriers, linking us to one another and to the earth itself. It’s about honouring what’s being lost while imagining new ways to stay connected to the natural world, even as it changes.