The Ice Mountain

Content : At the end of 2021 Marie Détrée embarks on board the Astrolabe to the Antarctic base of Dumont-d’Urville. As she describes it: “it is a trip that is both physical and where you suffer bad weather, but also a mystical experience with the appearance of the first icebergs in this padded and mysterious universe of the South Pole.”

From this experience was born a poetic, embodied text describing the life cycle of an iceberg.
The text is admirably accompanied by illustrations where shades of blue and orange tones clash to express the global warming, and where the use of collage makes readers feel the breaks that the ice undergoes throughout its journey towards the North.
A book that pushes readers to question as only artists can do.
This picture book is enriched with a documentary section on the trip to Adelie Land.
Theme: Anthropocene, ecology, sea, ice, mountain, femininity.

About the author/illustrator:
Marie Détrée was born in Saint-Malo, Brittany into a family of sailors. She graduated from Paris Fine Art School. She is an official painter of the Navy since 2010. This distinction gives her access to buildings of the Navy, allows her to go on missions on all the oceans, aboard frigates, aircraft carriers or even submarines. She stayed a month and a half aboard a polar patrol boat in Adelie Land.
Listed painter, her original work where she combines gouache, ink, felt and collage is increasingly requested for picture books.
This is her first picture book as an author and illustrator.