How Cassondra Odden Highlights Climate Change

“The most important thing is remembering things, documenting things, educating, and sharing with people.” 

— Cassondra Odden, interview with Sophie Kazan Maklouf, 2026

An artist from Alaska that I really thought you should know about is Cassondra Odden. Her father is Norwegian and her mother Iñupiaq and Unangax̂. Though she started her artistic practice in her early thirties, Odden has always been interested in art and photography as a way of capturing scenes and as a record of the landscape and animals that she wanted to know more about. Odden would carry a disposable camera around from an early age.

She remembers that her artistic practice started almost by accident in 2017. “My daughter and I would go on walks,” she says. “In our community, people collect rocks to paint and hide for others to find. When we first decided to do this, I picked up a rock and its shape reminded me of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.” She then painted Munch’s iconic face on the rock. And so it was that the artist’s close relationship to nature, her family, community, and cultural heritage all had a role to play in igniting her artistic career.

At first Odden began to paint more stones and discarded slices of wood. She soon gained commissions for holiday gifts, and she began to paint more intricate compositions and landscapes on canvas. Just as Munch’s iconic screaming figure’s intense state reflects onto the landscape of The Scream, so the wooded landscape in Chickaloon Foliage (2022) expresses the artist’s respect for nature and love of trees. The painting features a clearly delineated reddish earth foreground with green shrubs and tall white birch trunks, their golden foliage contrasting against the bright blue sky above. Beyond the earth is another blue sliver of water, which seems to be a fast-moving river. On the other side of the river are faraway mountains. In terms of colour and detail, this painting is balanced and perhaps allegorical in the way that it portrays the landscape close to the viewer as bright and “known,” the faraway bank as dark and “unknown,” crowned by a bright and all-seeing sky.

Cassondra Odden Where Life Flows (2025) from the Sedna Inuit Mythology Series © THE ARTIST

As we talk, Odden holds out her hands, revealing her kakiniit, or traditional tattoos. Odden delights in her Indigenous heritage and the stories passed down in her community. Where Life Flows (2025) is a painting that tells part of the story of Sedna, whose fingers were severed as she clung onto a kayak. The tips of Sedna’s severed fingers became the creatures of the seas and oceans, and Sedna became known as the sea goddess. In the painting, a hand with severed fingers and rivulets of blood creates a base or root for pinkish-red sea creatures drifting upwards. “This is why I have these tattoos,” says Odden. “I love painting and sharing these traditional stories.”

The northern lights have been the subject of numerous photographs, but Odden’s reflections of the green lights over the Alaskan landscape are spiritual and otherworldly. Not only do they portray a singular phenomenon, they also express the versatility of the landscape, which is able to transform itself from white wilderness into a dramatic backdrop. In her Drive-In Show at Talkeetna Mountains (2024) the snowy mountains in the foreground create a steady anchor and perspective for the show: the steady movement of magical green light rising above the mountains and disappearing out of view. 

If you enjoyed Cassondra Odden’s work, you may be interested in work by painter Becky Michelin, from Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, NL; painter Brian Kowikchuk, from Inuuvik, Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT; or multidisciplinary artist Bristol Sanatu Lakshas, with roots in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska. 


This Artist Spotlight originally appeared in the September 2026 Inuit Art Quarterly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here and be the first to receive new spotlights!