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 A collection of historical documents and pictures form another archive, telling us about the past from the perspectives of explorers, scientists and mountaineers.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.