![]() ![]() What I marveled at in distant Alaska once blanketed and shaped the seemingly quotidian landscapes I know intimately today. I repeated these small performances for groups of intrepid hikers, and, over time, a surprising yet meaningful pairing emerged with a distant and seemingly different landscape: the shoreline of my home state of Massachusetts, whose geology is carved by the onset and retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last ice age. My intention was to keep the process unintrusive to each landscape, while shedding light on the tremendous past and future power of the glacier to shape and reform the world we have known. I considered these illuminated acts an opportunity tell the glacier of the story back to itself with a small audience. ![]() Subsequently in the 10 pm Alaskan twilight, I hiked to project the Animated Drawings onto glacial ice a few miles north of a former mining town, with just a battery-powered projector, tripod, and a cell phone for my theater. Each drawing reflects the features and formation of a glacier: marks of accumulation, fracture, flow, and change, echoing and titled after the poetic terms used by glaciologists - ablatation, crevasse, firn, moraine, ogive. As I drew, I paused to photograph the drawing every few marks to document a stop-motion video of the process, as an evocation of the constant evolution of glaciers and their surrounding landscapes. Based on research into and direct observation of glaciers, I created six charcoal drawings on site in the Wrangell St. The project began as a visceral response to encountering the visual and sonic power of glaciers in Alaska, while attempting to grasp the vast geological timescale of their motion and earth-carving force. Animated Drawings for a Glacier pairs glacial landscapes on opposite coasts of the US: icebergs calved from the Kennicott Glacier, Alaska, and boulders transported on ice to the shore of Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, by the Laurentide Ice Sheet over 10,000 years ago. ![]()
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