John Grade Murmur

Mystic Seaport hosts the international debut of John Grade’s Murmur: Arctic Realities, which will be on view till April 22. Using salvaged Alaskan yellow cedar, Grade has created Murmur (15′ x 38′ x 42′), an intricately carved sculptural form that represents a pingo: hillocks of ice that aggregate over centuries in the Arctic’s highest latitudes. In the cycle of freezing and thawing, the pingos collapse, speckling the tundra landscape. Murmur simulates a specific pingo in Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve, one that Grade mapped using photogrammetry. Given its impressive scale, visitors can enter inside the sculpture as its walls open and close. Murmur‘s kinetic movement mimics the pingo’s life cycle, underscoring the accelerated pace of thawing in the Arctic due to climate change.