No-So-Perma

Glaciers and ice fields are melting at an unprecedented rate. This is evident in rising sea levels, decreasing freshwater availability, altered weather patterns, and eroding coastlines. Nonetheless, most people are not aware of how the acceleration of the melting polar icecap impacts us. In Marilyn Perry’s Not-So-Perma, viewers experience a visceral, immediate engagement with glacial melting —one that allows them to witness the impact of climate change.

To create this installation, Perry covers unfired clay with layers of porcelain to suggest the striations one sees in an ice-cap formation. She then freezes the object and embeds it in ice. As the ice melts into water, it gathers sediment and flows through openings and over a table’s edges. The raw clay softens, shifts, and dissolves into the water, much like permafrost soil muddies and collapses. This mixture merges with a fluid, mineral-laden painting beneath the table, just as permafrost melt flows into the ocean. The dissolved form leaves behind an unaffected plexiglass sheet—and highlights the impact of plastics’ entanglement in our waterways.

As viewers watch the ice melt, they experience an acute, paradoxical ache—they view an exquisitely beautiful object disappear in front of them. By blending the scales of deep geological time with glimpses of future time, Perry hopes viewers will fully experience the impact of climate change in the present. She hopes they will regard these massive glacial forms not as elements of a distant “wilderness,” but as living entities that are profoundly connected with human and non-human well-being.