Over two billion people depend on the Himalayan cryosphere for their survival. These glaciers are the water towers of Asia and the source of many great rivers: the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus, and Mekong among others. It bears repeating, the livelihood of over two billion people - their food, their water and energy security are all tethered to these glacial masses. Climate Change has already had affected biodiversity in all these regions. Should humanity manage to reduce carbon emissions and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, it’s already too late for one-third of the glaciers in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range, they will be gone by 2100. If emissions aren’t reduced, the projected loss soars to over two-thirds.
These bleak projections drew me to Nepal in 2018, where I completed a twelve-day trek to Mount Everest basecamp. I had the privilege to experience and photograph the renowned Himalayan mountains, and after extensive geological research, I started creating the series Anomaly, in 2020. This body of work fuses my glacial photographs with dual layers of colour. The resulting hot and cold binary images simultaneously highlight the fragility of these ice caps and foreshadows the impending climate crisis coming to this sacred region.
Several compositions are proportioned into thirds and produced as asymmetric diptychs. One-third of these landscapes reveal a reddish hue, illustrating the scale of glacial loss for this coming century. The blue is a hopeful reminder of what we can save.
Other compositions are monochromatic in hues of pink, posing as beacons of awareness for these endangered, glacial landscapes.
The colour scheme was derived from a climate graph generated by scientist Ed Hawkins, from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading. Hawkins creates visual graphs that simplify the communication of complex climate recordings by using colour bars that represent global warming trends. I’ve used a specific climate graph that depicts 100 years of surface temperature recordings in Nepal, to merge scientific data into the contemporary landscapes. When the body of work is on exhibit, the graph appears either as a large-scale mural or as an animated light projection in conjunction with the 2D works.
The title of the series, Anomaly, suggests a unique blip, an exception, an irregularity. But with each passing year we are seeing that the anomaly is now the new normal, Hawkins’ graph of Nepal’s surface temperature recordings succinctly demonstrates this. Climate Change isn’t something that is ‘coming’, it is here, we live in it. As an artist and activist, I work every day with this in mind.
I hope this body of work generates curiosity in viewers, encouraging them to learn more about the global impact of our changing climate and incites a call to action.
Climate Graph: The climate graph that I use during exhibitions illustrates surface temperature recordings in Nepal from 1901-2021. Hawkins uses colour bars that represent global warming trends over time to simplify complex data. The average temperature in 1971-2000 is set as the boundary between the blue and red colours, and the colour scale varies from +/- 2.6 standard deviations of the annual average temperatures between 1901-2021. Data for the graph was compiled from: Berkeley Earth, NOAA, UK Met Office, MeteoSwiss, DWD.