How do we contend with a reality as immense and consequential as ice loss?­

Climate change is having a critical impact on global ice bodies such as glaciers and ice sheets, part of the Earth System known as the “cryosphere”. The cryosphere is essential for all life on our planet. Abrupt changes to this system are contributing to feedback loops whereby warming melts ice, decreasing ice’s ability to reflect light (aka ‘albedo’) back into space, causing more solar radiation to be absorbed, which leads to more warming. And the cycle continues.

Glacial Bodies is about feeling one’s way through the precarity of climate change via an attunement to this loss. It’s about bearing witness to the phenomena of melt. How do we grapple with the realities of loss, both human and non-human? This exhibition attempts to collapse the extremities of time by pairing the idea of geologic time with the mortal time of the human body.

In September of 2023, I traveled across Iceland to experience glacial sites as part of my ongoing research into ice and climate change. This trip, alongside an in-depth examination of the place I inhabit, formed the genesis of this exhibition. The works in this show counterbalance the geography of Wisconsin’s past-glaciated landscape with Iceland’s active glaciation, a place critically vulnerable to global warming.

The video work, also titled Glacial Bodies, implements the emotional human body to understand issues which expand beyond the self to include the larger environment. In this work I attempt to map the experience of quiet glacial death onto my own body as a way of connecting more intimately with this phenomenon. This action becomes a means for excavating the metaphors contained within the ice: the dualities of time, the shifting states of matter, the artifacts of memory, the inevitability of loss.

This exhibition offers a space for contemplating the reverence we feel towards our environment, and the anxieties we may experience in bearing witness to its vulnerabilities.