LONDON.- Cristea Roberts Gallery is presenting Melting Ice | Rising Tides, a solo exhibition by Emma Stibbon. In a pivotal body of work, the artist presents new drawings, prints and an immersive installation, that bring us to the frontlines of climate change, connecting vanishing polar ice and surging sea-levels with the unprecedented erosion taking place on UK coastlines.

Like J.M.W Turner centuries before her, Stibbon bears witness to the changing landscape around us, bringing this powerful body of work to a London audience for the first time.

The exhibition opens with Berg II and Sea Ice, Svalbard, 2023, haunting, large-scale watercolours based on the artist’s expeditions to the High Arctic and the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Stibbon begins by making numerous sketches out in the field; the artist has described how the weather often works its way into the drawings, with spots of snow permanently marking the paper or media freezing on the page.

These preliminary drawings form the basis of her paintings when the artist returns to her studio in Bristol. The resulting watercolours, monumental in size, depict sea-ice breaking over dark seas and icebergs shrouded in sea-mist, disappearing into the horizon.

With sea-levels estimated to rise by 1-5m by the end of this century due to ice sheet melt, Stibbon’s work is an urgent call to action; many of these glaciated sites have changed beyond recognition in only a matter of years, with catastrophic repercussions for communities, wildlife and coastlines. For the next chapter of her research, the artist returned to UK shores, to the soft chalk coastlines of Sussex, where unstable cliffs are falling into the sea at an increasing rate due to rising sea-levels.

In two monumental drawings, Eastbourne, Sea groyne, and Breaker, 2023, a powerful wave heaves towards the Sussex shore, charged by climate-warming.

Stibbon includes elements of the landscape and naturally-occurring materials into her work; these inky drawings are made with seawater derived from the coastline, capturing the inherent physicality of the ocean. In Coastguard Cottage I (Birling Gap), 2024, a house sits precariously on the edge of a fragile cliff, the exposed cliff face rendered in chalk. Stibbon highlights the uneasy tension between receding coastlines and the increasingly volatile ocean.

On the North Devon coast, characterised for its harder sedimentary rocks, the artist decided to work with newly exposed pigments revealed through recent rock falls along the dramatic Devon Abbotsham cliffs, including Bideford Black, a geologically unique earth pigment ground for its dark hue. The artist, who often works with geologists and scientists, discovered the precise section of cliff was also the subject of a study by Imperial College, predicting that sea-level rise will accelerate the erosion of the rock coast at a rate not seen for 3,000 to 5,000 years. 1

To emphasise the threat to rock coasts that make up half of the Earth’s coastlines, Stibbon presents an immersive installation at Cristea Roberts Gallery. Rock Fall, 2025, is a site-specific and hyper-realistic drawing of the cliff-face in North Devon, measuring three metres in height that cascades into the gallery floor. Using pigments ground from rocks from the site, such as sandstone, clay, shales and limestone, the installation also includes actual rocks and mixed media to capture the varied geology and palette of colours developed over thousands of years.

Stibbon affirms her commitment to working from nature: “I feel working from landscape today has never been more pressing. I’m increasingly aware that I am living through a time of unprecedented change and that we need to understand what we are doing, and what we stand to lose.”

The artist considers the concept of the Sublime, to suggest to her audience that humanity can no longer admire spectacular scenes of nature from afar, instead Stibbon places us inside the frame of view. As ice melts in the polar regions and oceans gather force, our local cliffs crumble, enmeshing our present-day and futures within the extremities of the climate crisis, that can no longer be ignored.

The exhibition is accompanied by Melting Ice | Rising Tides, a catalogue published by Towner Eastbourne and the Royal Academy of Arts which contains a foreword by former Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, as well as an artist interview by curator Sara Cooper and an essay by author Richard Fisher.

Melting Ice | Rising Tides is the last venue of a major touring exhibition which opened at Towner Eastbourne in May 2024, Burton at Bideford in May 2025, and ends its national tour at Cristea Roberts Gallery in autumn 2025.

Emma Stibbon: Melting Ice | Rising Tides is part of London Art+Climate Week, a multi-day event spotlighting exhibitions and activations across London on the topic of climate action in the arts. Presented by Gallery Climate Coalition and gowithYamo, London Art+Climate Week runs parallel to COP30 from 12 – 16 November 2025.

The artist considers the concept of the Sublime, to suggest to her audience that humanity can no longer admire spectacular scenes of nature from afar, instead Stibbon places us inside the frame of view. As ice melts in the polar regions and oceans gather force, our local cliffs crumble, enmeshing our present-day and futures within the extremities of the climate crisis, that can no longer be ignored.

The exhibition is accompanied by Melting Ice | Rising Tides, a catalogue published by Towner Eastbourne and the Royal Academy of Arts which contains a foreword by former Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, as well as an artist interview by curator Sara Cooper and an essay by author Richard Fisher.

Melting Ice | Rising Tides is the last venue of a major touring exhibition which opened at Towner Eastbourne in May 2024, Burton at Bideford in May 2025, and ends its national tour at Cristea Roberts Gallery in autumn 2025.

Emma Stibbon: Melting Ice | Rising Tides is part of London Art+Climate Week, a multi-day event spotlighting exhibitions and activations across London on the topic of climate action in the arts. Presented by Gallery Climate Coalition and gowithYamo, London Art+Climate Week runs parallel to COP30 from 12 – 16 November 2025.


1 Dr Dylan Rood, Imperial College London Sea level rise to dramatically speed up erosion of rock coastlines by 2100, Science Daily 2022