Welcoming the Final Artists-in-Residence of 2025: Amy Hoagland & Kathy Sirico
Artica Svalbard is pleased to welcome the final residents of 2025: Amy Hoagland, a sculptural installation artist based in Denver, and Kathy Sirico, a Brooklyn-based artist and poet working across painting, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Together, they join us in Longyearbyen to develop new work shaped by Svalbard’s polar night and the rapidly changing environment.
Hoagland’s research-driven practice considers the human entanglement with geologic time. Through sculpture and installation, she reflects on landscapes as living records of movement: wind-carved surfaces, shifting soil, and glacial transformations that unfold beyond human perception. During her residency, she will develop a daily practice of “acts of relationality” with the Arctic landscape—creating small, cumulative gestures through performance, writing, photography, and video. These actions will inform new sculptural works exploring how an understanding of slow geologic processes may deepen our awareness of human-driven environmental change.
Sirico’s interdisciplinary work engages with climate change through abstraction, myth, and material experimentation. Building from her 2023 expedition with The Arctic Circle Residency, she will expand two interconnected projects developed in response to witnessing climate disruption firsthand. Her series Svalbard Abstractions translates Arctic experiences into vibrant painting and stained-glass forms, while Svalbard Mythologies is a narrative poetry collection that imagines interspecies dialogues—interviewing glacial melt, conversing with whale bones, and listening to iceberg soundscapes. Together, her writing and visual work trace a poetic call for empathy toward non-human life.
As the year closes, both artists will investigate how landscapes hold stories: of slow transformation, ecological grief, resilience, and interdependence. Their parallel inquiries—Hoagland through geologic time, Sirico through myth and narrative—offer two distinct ways of sensing and interpreting the Arctic. We look forward to sharing more from their time in Svalbard as their research unfolds.