"Full Circle" - Laura Millard

In August 2024, Millard joined an invited group of artists and scientists to circumnavigate the Svalbard archipelago, sailing to the pack ice at 82 degrees north, through the Arctic Circle Alumni Residency. Full Circle at Red Head Gallery, November 6-30, 2024, is Millard’s response to this voyage. Grappling with imagery that reflects the dramatic effects of the climate crisis, Millard’s works depict retreating glaciers in Svalbard, the fastest-heating place on Earth. As the U.N. Climate Action Summit struggles to find ways to limit the global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, temperatures on Svalbard have already risen by 4 degrees Celsius.

While the International Territory of Svalbard has never had an Indigenous population, it was settled for coal extraction in the early 1900s. This industry is now being replaced with tourism, further threatening ecological decline—more going in circles. Seeking ways to move landscape imagery beyond the sublime, the elegiac, and the grand, Millard’s work contends with the role visual art might play in our engagement with the climate crisis. 

Millard’s current production revisits ideas explored in her series Crossing, (2019), where she created repetitive circular drawings in the snow with a snowmobile and documented the marks from above. The ludicrous act of going nowhere - only in circles – atop an obnoxiously loud machine served as a metaphor for how little progress we are making in the face of a climate catastrophe. This absurdity questions what has been normalized and uncomfortably reframes visual conventions in the landscape canon by viewing it through a different lens. Picking up on the idea of repetitive circling, Millard has fabricated a series of ‘motion lamps’, by refurbishing novelty lights that were popular in the 1950s. These revolving scenes are propelled by the heat of a lightbulb, and often depict tourist destinations such as Niagara Falls. Millard has replaced these typically romantic scenes with her photographs of rapidly melting glaciers in the high Arctic. The result is disquieting, spinning images attached to obsolete tchotchkes – now harbingers groaning out messages through their precarious mechanisms.

The exhibition, featuring large format photography, video, and sculptural installation is Millard’s premiere with Redhead Gallery. The production is supported by funding from the Ontario Arts Council.