Julie Edel Hardenberg, a Greenlandic artist of Inuit and Danish descent, has become one of the most compelling voices in Arctic contemporary art through her conceptually charged and visually stunning body of work. Among her many innovative projects, her beaded iceberg series stands out for its poetic balance of fragility, monumentality, and cultural critique. These works—sculptures, installations, and wall-mounted forms of beaded icebergs—speak to the unique hybridity of her Greenlandic identity, the existential threats facing the Arctic, and the power of beadwork to embody environmental, political, and emotional resonance. Hardenberg’s beaded icebergs are not just objects of visual wonder; they are multilayered vessels that hold stories of melting worlds, fractured memory, and Indigenous resilience stitched in light and glass.
Hardenberg’s decision to render icebergs in beads is both material and metaphoric. Icebergs are colossal, cold, and impermanent—geological structures that calve and vanish, bearing the visible traces of climate change. Beads, by contrast, are small, warm to the touch, and seemingly eternal. In bringing these two scales and materials together, Hardenberg creates a tension that underlies all her beaded iceberg work: the enormous encapsulated in the intimate, the ephemeral preserved in the enduring. She transforms the melting iceberg from something distant and monumental into something tactile and personal, one bead at a time. Each sculpture is a hand-stitched act of attention, an insistence that disappearing things—cultures, languages, environments—deserve not only to be remembered, but reimagined through care and craft.
The beaded icebergs vary in form and size, from palm-sized reliefs to room-dominating hanging structures suspended from steel frames, their transparent underbellies illuminated by shifting lights that mimic the Arctic sun. Constructed with thousands of tiny glass seed beads, primarily in hues of translucent white, glacial blue, pearl, and silver, these sculptures mimic the crystalline striations and pitted surfaces of real icebergs. Hardenberg works with a technique that fuses traditional Inuit bead embroidery with sculptural construction: layers of beaded netting are shaped over armatures made from resin, gauze, or hand-felted wool, stitched tightly to follow the curves and jagged planes of the underlying structure. The result is a beaded skin that catches and reflects light in ways eerily similar to ice itself, giving the illusion that the forms are melting, breathing, or slowly transforming as the viewer moves around them.
But these are not abstract formal exercises. Hardenberg embeds her icebergs with symbolism drawn from her Inuit heritage and the complex geopolitics of Greenland. Many of the larger pieces are beaded with traditional patterns in their core—motifs drawn from sealskin boots, sled designs, or ulu blade ornamentation—visible only when viewed from below or within, suggesting that cultural knowledge is embedded deep within the land and ice, not always visible but always present. Some works incorporate red beads interspersed among the white, evoking veins, wounds, or geological seams. In her piece Kalaallit Nunaat (Our Land), a towering iceberg sculpture is beaded with a subtle map of Greenland’s fjords in navy blue seed beads, stitched along fault lines that reference both tectonic plates and colonial fractures. The piece speaks quietly but powerfully about sovereignty, extraction, and survival.
Hardenberg also considers language and erasure in her iceberg work. In Unnuaq (The Night), a mid-sized wall-mounted iceberg rendered in smoky grey and blue beads, she beads the Greenlandic word for “dream” into the sculpture in syllabic form, using black glass beads that only become visible when the sculpture is lit from the side. The word is not legible from all angles—viewers must seek it out, move around the piece, and look closely. This engagement is intentional. As Hardenberg explains, it mirrors the way Greenlandic language itself exists in tension with Danish and English in her country—often overshadowed, misunderstood, or sidelined in public discourse. By embedding Greenlandic language into beaded ice, she is asserting its centrality in the Arctic narrative, even if it is hidden beneath layers of Western perception.
Materially, the labor involved in creating these works is immense. One small iceberg sculpture might contain over 10,000 individual beads, each stitched by hand with waxed thread. The process is slow, meditative, and deliberate. Hardenberg likens her practice to a form of land-based listening: a way of attending to what the ice and environment are saying through slow time. It is also an intergenerational act. Beadwork has long been a part of Inuit women’s artistic and spiritual practice, used to decorate parkas, boots, mittens, and ceremonial objects. By transforming beadwork from wearable adornment into large-scale sculpture, Hardenberg is honoring this lineage while also pushing it into contemporary global conversations about climate, gender, and decolonization.
Her iceberg installations have been exhibited in both Arctic and international settings—from the Nuuk Art Museum and the Tromsø Kunstforening to the Venice Biennale’s Nordic Pavilion, where her work was placed alongside other contemporary Indigenous Arctic artists confronting the intersecting issues of environment, identity, and extractive politics. In these exhibitions, Hardenberg often displays the beaded icebergs in low-lit environments that mimic polar twilight, with ambient soundscapes of cracking ice, wind, and spoken Greenlandic poetry. The effect is immersive and elegiac, inviting viewers to contemplate not only the visual beauty of the work but the looming loss it signifies.
At the core of Julie Edel Hardenberg’s beaded icebergs is a radical reimagining of what beadwork can be. She transforms a practice often relegated to the category of “craft” into a profound aesthetic and conceptual tool for examining cultural endurance, ecological collapse, and the intangible weight of memory. Her work does not offer easy resolutions or didactic statements. Instead, it invites contemplation, demanding that viewers sit with ambiguity, complexity, and quiet awe. Each iceberg is a monument not just to the Arctic but to the act of making itself—the slow, deliberate act of preserving beauty, of mourning change, of stitching together a future bead by bead. Through this practice, Hardenberg elevates beadwork into the realm of contemporary environmental poetics, and in doing so, ensures that the stories of the ice—its songs, its scars, its silences—will not be forgotten.