An Empire of Ice: Paintings from Svalbard

An Empire of Ice: Paintings from Svalbard brings seven years of Arctic painting to the Brookwood Library Gallery in Hillsboro, Oregon, December 2026 through February 2027. The work has been exhibited in Norway, Greenland, Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. This is its first showing in the United States.

In 2018 Elizabeth Philotera Bourne packed seven suitcases and moved to Longyearbyen, Svalbard — the world’s northernmost town, at the edge of the polar ice cap. For seven years she documented what she saw and experienced there in photographs and paintings, returning to the Pacific Northwest in 2025.

Ice as cathedral

Bourne uses sea ice as a metaphor for life, and glaciers as a call back to the great cathedrals of Europe. The paintings take the ice in all its forms — drift ice, glacier faces, the blue interiors of melt caves. Hidden within them are playful images of polar bears, octopuses and other creatures iconic of her life both in the Pacific Northwest and in the Arctic.

Visiting

The gallery is on the second floor of the Brookwood Library, 2850 NE Brookwood Parkway, Hillsboro, Oregon. Admission is free.

The gallery is open during library hours — Monday to Thursday 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM, Friday to Sunday 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. Hours can change over the holidays, so check the library’s gallery page or call 503-615-6500 before you make the drive.

More of Bourne’s Svalbard paintings, with their titles and sizes, are on her website.