Mother Spirit the Snowy Owl
Hand pulled original Woodcut Print (oil-based ink on handmade cloud dragon rice paper)
Paper size: 8x10” / 20x25cm
Image size: 6x8.75” / 15x22cm
2022
Editions of 100 + 5AP
unframed
Mother Spirit, a snowy owl, is the Ice Queen’s great great great great great grandmother and lives in an ice cave. No one knows the path to the ice cave except for the royal family. That means the Ice Queen and her sister. No one knows how old Mother Spirit is and whether she is still alive or has transcended into a goddess.
Whenever the Ice Queen has dilemmas she doesn’t know how to solve, she would trek for days to the secret ice cave to seek her great great great great great grandmother’s advice.
*On my arctic residency trip, our leader Sarah told us that the snowy owls are almost like a mythical animal to them. They are supposed to winter in Svalbard but are never sighted. She had never seen one.
**When we arrived at Tempelfjorden, Svalbard, our leader Sarah found this incredible ice cave. She immediately decided to station overnight so that the entire group could return to the ice cave the next day. We visited the cave alone or in pairs in silence, taking care not to make fresh treks so that each of us would share the same fresh magical experience.
***Each print is original, hand-pulled and may look slightly different from the image sample.
About Northlandia Arctic Woodcuts
In Oct-Nov 2022, I went on a month-long research residency programme “The Arctic Circle” in the arctic Svalbard for Northlandia, one of the five imaginary countries in my lifelong World of 2084 project. During the trip, I sketched landscape on site on small woodblocks and weaved Northlandia narrative into the composition and carve the woodblocks on the boat and in my room in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town.
The collection of 24 Northlandia Arctic Woodcuts was then be hand-printed in Hong Kong and launched in December 2022. These small woodcut prints serve as a starting point for larger works (woodcuts and drawings and more) under the Northlandia arctic narrative I will develop over the next decade.
About Northlandia
Northlandia is one of the five imaginary countries in The World of 2084, my lifelong project to portray a futuristic world in the corresponding year.
Drawing from diverse sources such as early arctic pioneer history, Inuit and Central American mythology, science fiction and children's literature, literary tradition magical realism and fairy tales, Northlandia is a surreal arctic tale of the precarious balance between human greed and the magical landscape, between the north and the rest of the world and between self-preservation and the rapidly changing climate.
