I draw to explore ideas about land and how it is altered through time. I contemplate history and seek stories of change which come about from a wide range of processes, including human interactions. The compositions rely on cropping and scale changes to convey my emotional and physical response to these places. I build up layers of lines and shapes to hint at transformation. The marks symbolize a memory of time that is woven within earth’s layers of growth, accretion and decay.

I have focused on ice cores, glaciers and ice sheets for almost two decades. Ice is a beautiful metaphor for the deep memory of the natural world and the frailty of our planets ecosystems. It offers symbolic stories of the planet and our effect on that story through millennia. This work explores the micro scale of ice cores and the macro scale of the ice sheets and glaciated environments of West Antarctica, Greenland and the Pacific Northwest.

I had discussions with several glaciology scientists that evolved into a collaborative relationship for several projects; The WAIS Divide Ice Core Project in West Antarctica, the Mt Waddington Ice Core Project in British Columbia, and Snow on Ice, in Greenland. I traveled to these field camps to draw and document field work. The resulting bodies of work form a narrative of place, scientific discovery, and our changing planet.

I went into nearby mountains to sleep beside glaciers, to look at patterns of flow and collapse. My home in Seattle sits in a basin carved by an ice sheet very similar to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. An expanse of time is the only thing that separates these environments. The ice sheet grew layer by layer over millennia, encasing dusts from volcanic outbursts, savannah fires, and droughts. It lies silently collecting our behaviors as well, misguided explorers, wars, disappearing forests and spikes in carbon.

The ice fields are massive, full of detailed information and utterly blank. Our lives, so full of stories and memories, are the same. We begin and end in a blank. Watching the drifts of snow on the West Antarctic plateau bury our efforts to carve out space again and again was humbling and reassuring. No manner of engineering can resist the slow flow of ice to sea.