Regan Rosburg

Everything is Fine

Handwritten letters from around the world

2017 - ongoing

Statement about the work:

In 2017, I curated a massive exhibition centered around Ecopsychology called "Axis Mundi." As part of the exhibiton, I asked teenagers to write letters to adults expressing their innermost feelings about what was happening to the planet. The letters were strikingly honest.

Two years later, I traveled to Svalbard with thirty other artists for the Arctic Circle Residency. The vast, expansive, pristine landscape of the Arctic affected each of us deeply. At the same time, we collected hundreds of pounds of garbage every time we made landfall.

The inherent contradictions of the Arctic — felt by all of us — prompted me to expand the letter project to my comrades on the ship, and then expanded it even further to include gardeners, librarians, biologists, engineers, art historians, landscapers, and more. All wrote personal letters voicing concern, love, fear, anger, wonder, guilt, melancholy, and cautious optimism.

Everything is Fine has been exhibited in various cities, including Chicago as part of the Human/Nature Exhibition with Weinberg-Newton Gallery and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

This letter project is ongoing and expanding globally. Since its inception, the project has grown to over 500 letters -- and counting.In August of 2024, I returned to Svalbard to collect more letters from artists and scientists. Meanwhile, back in Colorado, middle and high schoolers added to the collection of voices. If you have something to say about our changing planet, I would like to hear from you.

To contribute a letter, email me and I will give you my address. Letters must be handwritten; please, no emails or typed letters. Letters can be a rant, a lovely memory, a poem, a list, an image, or any other format. You can address the letter to the future, to your kids, to your grandkids, or no one at all. There is no right or wrong way to write this letter.

Coming soon: the DEAR FUTURE GLOBAL LETTER ARCHIVE, an online letter submission process that connects people from around the world. Launch date: January 2025.

In the early Spring of 2020, the work was installed at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, along with the ghost nets and plastic from the Arctic. Images from the expedition were installed upside down on the wall to slow the viewer down and symbolically reorient the typical view of our environment.

Installation view of Everything Is Fine at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (2020), including 3D printed bio-poems of the first orginal student letters.

Everything is Fine (letter side of wall)

Handwritten letters, shelves, 3D printed bio-poems (selected letters were turned into 3D modeled proteins and printed in PLA plastic)

2020, installed at RedLine Contemporary Art Center

12 x 11 feet

Biopoems (on shelves): collaboration with Sebastian Coccioba, 2017, for Axis Mundi Exhibition

Everything Is Fine (plastic side of wall)

2020, installed at RedLine Contemporary Art Center

12 x 11 feet

Ghost nets and found plastic from the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard, Norway, 2019)

Installation View

Everything Is Fine at RedLine Contemporary Art Center.

In this video, I show the recovered stomach contents from the skeleton of a seabird on Svalbard. The contents are a tangled mess of plastic and what looks like a petroleum-based fabric, such as a dryer sheet.

Dagmar Traenkle, an artist on the expedition, discusses her impression of the changes she witnessed upon her second visit to the archipelago.

"My impression -- it seems that the rest of the world has arrived here in Svalbard, with all of its bad impact."

At the end of the video, I show a timelapse of all of the plastic collected over two weeks placed at the foot of a glacier and documented.

To learn more about my Arctic Plastic project, please visit the photography section of this website.