At 80° north in Svalbard, beneath the drifting light of a sun that never sets, Patricia Brace enacted daily gestures on pack ice, along the Lilliehöökbreen glacier, and from the deck of the Rembrandt van Rijn, a three-masted sailing vessel. Brace performed actions such as paddling across ice floes, leaping into frigid waters, and dancing over glacial terrain—each marking a journey into the unknown, suspended between reverence, grief for rapidly melting ice, and fleeting beauty. In her practice, masks and natural environments have long served as sites of doubling and porous boundaries—between body and landscape, presence and absence, self and other. For these Arctic performances, Brace wore a mask designed and forged by her father, blacksmith George Brace. In this terrain, the mask became a conduit of generational knowledge and care, extending kinship across human and ecological lines, and embodying lineage, craft, and ecological urgency to evoke both inevitability and resilience.

The title "A Sun Without A Sphere" signals catastrophe and boundlessness: the sun uncontained, radiating without orbit, and the ceaseless Arctic light. Created in Svalbard, where warming occurs five times faster than the global average, the work confronts the climate crisis through performance, kinship, and fragile endurance.