Christina Lorena Weisner’s art emerges from her deep connection to the earth, to its systems and rhythms, its elements and mysteries. She studies the planet like a scientist and discovers it like an explorer, venturing to its far ends to record its extremes in person, to live within its phenomena. She turns her insights into art she hopes will inspire awe for our planet’s grandeur and empathy for its vulnerability.

Her latest fascination is the North Pole, where she spent two weeks immersing herself last spring with an expeditionary art and science residency called The Arctic Circle. “I can only describe it as the most impactful experience of my life,” Weisner says. “I’ve been interested in water for a long time, and I wanted to immerse myself into this landscape of glaciers in order to better understand it.” 

The expedition’s ship, which carried 30 fellow resident artists and scientists, took Weisner and others to the Svalbard Archipelago by outboard Zodiacs twice a day, always surrounded by “a triangulation of guards with guns” to protect them against polar bears. While ashore, Weisner planted an orange safety flag in the icescape, making it a recurring motif in her photos. She also used a drone to shoot video from above and collected plastic. 

“You’re in a land that you know is changing, you’re looking at a glacier that might not be there in 100 years. You’re looking at history,” she says. That history was evident in other ways, too, like a massive pile of whale bones left behind by 19th century whalers, and the detritus left behind by scientific explorers of that time. “There were many instances where I was thinking of human history as it relates to geological time,” Weisner says. 

The trip “was the catalyst for a whole new body of work,” says Weisner, who is headed back next May. That work includes still photography of that mythic frontier, sweeping video and installations that incorporate pieces of plastic she collected in and around Svalbard.  

Recently, her work was in Surface and Undercurrents, a group show at Dare Arts in Manteo, and this month she is part of a group exhibit at Emerge Gallery & Art Center in Greenville. Next April she will be featured in a group show at Central Connecticut State University on climate change in the Arctic, and in June her work will be exhibited in a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Arlington, Virginia. 

A native of Richmond, Virginia, Weisner says she can trace the beginnings of her work as an artist to a job she had with Nag’s Head Ocean Rescue in her early 20s. When she wasn’t saving swimmers, she stared out at the ocean for 10 hours a day. “I would watch the sun move across the sky and the moon come up,” she says. “I was very aware of these bigger processes — these large-scale movements, like waves coming over from the coast of Africa — that we’re not often aware of.