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Out in the cold: Photo series by Hale Güngör Oppenheimer

One of the biggest events of our lives is when we leave home and strike out on our own. But unlike a wedding or your first day at school, there's often not one singular moment when we leave the place and people that nurtured us. More often that not, we gradually drift away...

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A triangular glass panel mounted on a turquoise wall displays an illustrated house sitting atop a white iceberg rendered in pencil, secured by three metallic bolts

That's the central theme of these striking artworks by Hale Güngör Oppenheimer, an artist originally from Mollis, Switzerland and now living and working in Stockholm, Sweden. In a new series titled 'Subaquatic', Oppenheimer combines images of houses in Mollis, which she's gathered from Google Maps, with images of icebergs that she's created herself.

The thematic connection between the buildings the artist has said goodbye to and the chunks of polar ice, which have also broken off from their homeland and continued to exist as separate entities, is both immediate and poignant.

And the series, which went on show earlier this year at the Pg Gallery in Istanbul, Turkey, poses a question: just as an iceberg hides 91 per cent of its mass below the surface, how much do we hide away from our sense of loss at leaving home?

White pencil sketch of an iceberg with a small Swiss house at its base, mounted on a green glass panel with metal fixtures
An iceberg with white frost-covered top half in a green glass tray holds a small illustration of a residential building at its base
Glass panel display against a teal wall featuring a white paper sculpture of an iceberg with a Swiss house collaged onto its surface, surrounded by smaller encased artworks
Multiple house images from Google Maps encased in translucent iceberg forms against a teal background, representing Hale Güngör Oppenheimer's Subaquatic series
White paper fragments scattered across a deep teal gallery wall, part of Hale Güngör Oppenheimer's Subaquatic series exploring themes of displacement and loss
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