Scroll III

“Imagination is the key to pre-experiencing alternative futures.” Gyorgy Kepes

This piece, created in April 2021, adds a futuristic element to the storyline initiated by Scroll I and Scroll II. Here I include images of this piece and statements excerpted from my thesis.

Scroll III. 22x80 inches: relief woodcut, acrylic intaglio, collage and chine-collé on paper, 2021. Photograph by Torsten Brinkema.

Scroll III is the unfinished, uncertain act of worlding a future North Cascades. This print arises from the world that I can imagine: detritus peeks through the delicate body of a planet sculpted by glaciers, watersheds of glacial blue burst into jumbles of light, a mangle of plastics is home to microbes. People pick up the ragged edges of the watersheds, finding solutions to the changing climate within their communities. Families gather ripe berries. In glacier-free valleys, there are no vacancies. Lichens explode over the rocks, and plants braid roots and sow seeds to the rhythms of an upward march. The world changes, cracks, burns, floods and goes on healing. Toxified ice crystals feed rumbling streams, feeding dying trees. Water in all forms is companion to life, to emergence, to death, and to decay. The pieces of the planet continue jostling because the act of becoming a world is constantly transformative. 

Scroll III emerges from a soup of speculative thinking about the future of the North Cascades. Cast in jewel tones, with chaotic contrasts and novel combinations of imagery, this piece is not settled, or even sure what it is. This is fitting in that it speculates on the future impacts and possibilities of climate change. Scroll III is inspired by speculative work such as Ecosystem of Excess by Pinar Yoldas. Within visual culture, there is a need to use less familiar images to prompt new stories about climate change. ‘Classic’ images such as a pelican drenched in oil, or a shrunken glacier, sustain cynicism and climate fatigue. I linger with Yoldas’s work because she invents a completely new set of possibilities with her plastic species and organisms, enabling us to respond anew to our current predicament. 

Worlding, as a verb, refers to a generative and active process. When an individual engages with a pile of interrelated happenings, a ‘world’ emerges for them (Palmer and Hunter 2018). Anderson and Harrison (2010) suggest that the world in “worlding” is “a mobile but more or less stable ensemble of practices, involvements, relations, capacities, tendencies and affordances." The process of worlding reflects individual engagement with entangled human-nature relationships. Scroll III shows my imagination acting upon the “ensemble” in the future. 

Speculating Scroll III was quite challenging. I spent months trying to imagine what a “futures” glacier print would look like and I just barely made the noodly chaotic mess that is Scroll III in time for my exhibition. I found surprisingly few representations of what adaptation to climate change might look and feel like, giving me little existing material to play with, as I had with my other scrolls. I rested on my own thoughts for these speculations and returned to hopeful ideas about the “ensemble” such as: so many organisms will suck up the glacial melt water. Trees will grow thick bark, tall trunks and deep roots as they drink the runoff. Generations upon generations of people will derive meaning and sustenance and power from deglaciating landscapes. Families can harvest salmonberries, go hiking, and tend crops enriched by glacial sediment. Ecosystems and cultures are resilient and will grow around warm rivers, abundant berries and even the proliferation of microplastics. I channel these hopeful thoughts through new and old woodblocks, using vibrant color and intense compositions to highlight imminent change and possibility. Whitebark, a futures side project to Scroll III, utilizes uncanny colors and contrasting images of live and dead trees to evoke the flicker of the future: difficult to pin down, but important to imagine.

Whitebark. Relief woodcut and digital image, 2021.

Scroll III is my retaliation to the loss-centered story, the narrative that makes us lose our ability to imagine a future. It rises from my love of glaciers, and my frustration with how we tell their stories. Even though it is painful and fascinating to watch the glaciers that I love vanish, what agitates me is that we are stuck in seeing only the diminishment of ice, and not what is past it. If we are blind to emergence, we cannot orient ourselves to plan or act for the future. Scroll III embraces change. I believe change is an extremely exciting opportunity to care for each other and our world in better ways, and to listen and collaborate with one another. We won’t achieve the future we want to have if we don’t believe it is possible. And we won’t believe it if we only see diminishment. So, it is necessary for artists, science communicators, and scientists, to interpret data with optimism and imagination. “Artists believe in the future” was my motto in creating this work. In the absence of knowing exactly what monsters and gifts the Anthropocene will bear, art is necessary to think through, feel, and picture the possibilities. 

Scroll I

Digging into the glacial history of the North Cascades, I created Scroll I. This is a configuration of prints along the theme of Mountain Evidence. It copies the structure of Scroll II, but touches on more moments and perspectives from the past. Here I include images of this piece and statements excerpted from my thesis.

Scroll I: Mountain Evidence. 22x80 inches, relief woodcut, relief acrylic, pen, collage and chine-collé on paper, 2021. Photograph by Torsten Brinkema

To understand the history of glaciers and how people have understood them in the North Cascades, I look to the archives. Ice is an archive itself. It holds information about past climates and is thus understood as a laboratory for Western scientists. A collection of historical documents and pictures form another archive, telling us about the past from the perspectives of explorers, scientists and mountaineers. Scroll I renders these archives with traditional woodcuts printed in blacks and bright blues. A cascade of evidence flows down the paper. The scientific dimensions unfold through “loss books”, bathymetric profiles and topographic maps. Histories of subsistence, climate science, recreation and territorial claims abut and overlap one another, all framed by the unique North Cascades landscape. 

My investigation of the North Cascades led me to many interesting accounts, photographs and renderings of glacial history in the North Cascades. This archive inspired the print Scroll I and the “remnants” composing it, including Glacier Women. Like my other scrolls, the individual elements that make up the tall composition carry stories of their own. For some pieces of the prints, I replicated quotes from explorer’s diaries and figures from published scientific articles. Acknowledging the biases in what information is retained in the archive, I also leaned on my imagination to image the histories and experiences of people besides the white men in the roles of explorers, politicians and scientists that appear in the history books. Although depicting history was very different from depicting the future, I found myself speculating a surprising amount within both themes. 

Detail from top of Scroll I. Photograph by Torsten Brinkema.

Two of the unique printmaking elements nestled within Scroll I are “loss books” and handwritten quotes. The loss books are stacks of paper pinned through the larger print at their top edge. Each page has a cut out of the glacier’s perimeter for a given year, adapted from maps and aerial images from USGS and NCGCP. Inspired by Maya Lin’s Disappearing Bodies of Water: Arctic Ice, these two-and-a-half dimensional flipbooks show the diminishing glacier bodies of the Lyman Glacier and the South Cascade Glacier over time. 

The handwritten quotes were transcribed from Fred Beckey’s book Range of Glaciers(2003) and represent early settlers’ and explorers’ impressions of the North Cascades. I also draw from Østrem’s (1966) handbook for glacier measurements and The North Cascades: Finding Beauty and Renewal in the Wild Nearby(Dietrich and Snyder 2014).While these quotes illuminate interesting points of view, many others have traversed this landscape. The voices of women are not well represented in the archive, so I fabulated perspectives with the pair of Glacier Women prints. One is based on an image taken in 1910 of a women’s mountaineering expedition to Glacier Peak. The other is an imagined scene of women and children harvesting berries. History may be written by the victors, but it can also be reimagined and re-depicted.

Remnants related to Scroll I: Mountain Evidence. Woodcut relief and handwritten script, 2021.

Exhibition: Visualizing the Range of Glaciers

Well, I’ve done it. I plotted, printed and pasted together a solo exhibition with four original Scrolls and four enlarged “elements” of my prints mounted on foam board. The show was created with funding and support from the Colby ES department. My pieces hung in the Diamond Building at Colby College in Waterville, Maine from April 23-May 14th, 2021. Diamond houses environmental science, government, economics, anthropology and other departments, so a variety of people brushed by these prints. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, they were only viewable by Colby students, faculty and staff.

I’ll let these images speak for themselves. Many thanks to my friend Torsten Brinkema for photographing the exhibition.

Visualizing the Range of Glaciers, thesis exhibition at Colby College. 2021.

Photograph by Torsten Brinkema

Exhibition Poster

Wolverine Scroll

Detail of Scroll I

Scrolls I-III

S. Cascade Glacier Mobile

Hallway Viewers

Portal, 2021 and its happy creator. This prints was enlarged from its original 8x10 inches to 40x50 inches.