Helen Chellin

You Can't Make a Mistake in the Arctic Helen Chellin

You Can't Make a Mistake in the Arctic tells a visual story with text about my journey into the Northwest Passage on Adventure Canada's ship the Ocean Endeavor. My interior cabin was 5143. It had no porthole. I was in the center of the ship and there found my own center space that is my painting studio. Perfect. Here I was alone to explore what I did experience, each day in the outer world with my inward visions and imagination. On my canvas and on paper I began to open many portals. I moved in tandem with the polar sea weaving through an archipelago containing many islands of earth and ice. It is land that has many ways to record time. The ice cores and glaciers record time past and then melt into the present. Going to the arctic I am a visual recorder of this type of time in my paintings. Like the ocean and ice, my images expand and recede; in and out of spatial realms, like the polar bear moves between land, ocean and ice. The brown bear moved out of the forests during the last ice age and became a subspecies known as the polar bear. This White bear is now moving again because of climate change that has mostly been caused by humans. Both our species face possible extinction if we do not bear witness to this fact.