TUSASS Greenland has been a member of SEPAC, the Small European Postal Administrations Co-opera- tion, for 25 years. The current twelve member states of Sepac are: The Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Greenland, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, the Vatican and Åland. By and large, these small European postal services share the same challenges with small domestic postal markets and large export markets for stamp collectors.
Since 2007, the Sepac countries have each issued a stamp in a joint series every other year and every year since 2013. The Sepac stamps are recognisable by the special Sepac logo, which is incorporated in the design of these stamps. The common theme changes from year to year. The common theme of the 2022 stamp is: ’Local beverages’.
Greenlandic bottled water
For thousands of years and over several ice ages, water has been frozen and preserved in Greenland’s ice cap, creating a unique encapsulation of one of the planet’s most precious treasures: clean drinking water. Water from the Greenland ice sheet is bottled in various sizes, creating drinking water of outstanding quality. Greenlandic water is sold in glass or plastic bottles, both domestically in Greenland and on the international market.
The origins of the stamp design
The artist Lisbeth Karline Poulsen created Greenland’s 2022 Sepac stamp. During her work on the design, she was inspired by Ilulissat, where she lives, which is renowned for its enormous ice fjord. While creating the stamp design of the bottle containing Greenlandic water, Lisbeth collected clumps of ice near the port in Ilulissat. She took the clumps of ice home and used the melted ice water from them to mix in the blue colours seen on the stamp.
Moreover, the water in the bottle as seen on the stamp is quite literally filled with the melted water from the aforementioned clumps of ice. The stamp thus specifically illustrates very accurately the theme of TUSASS Greenland’s Sepac stamp for 2022: Greenlandic bottled water.
About the artist
Lisbeth Karline was born in Nanortalik in 1981. She grew up on Funen, Denmark and in Uummannaq. She trained as an artist at the Nuuk School of Fine Arts and later at the Aarhus Academy of Fine Arts. She was also educated at Copenhagen Film & Theatre School. Besides the visual arts, Lisbeth has also gained notori- ety as a television actress, appearing in the Danish TV series ‘Lykke’ from 2011.
In 2016, she became a member of the association of artists in Greenland, KIMIK. Lisbeth has worked professionally with her art, based in Nuuk, Zealand, Denmark, and most recently in Ilulissat, where she lives with her husband and their two children. This is Lisbeth’s twelfth stamp since her debut Greenlandic stamp in 2014.
