Scroll III
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.