A re-introduction to this year’s work

Since last summer, I have been making woodblock prints and collage about the North Cascades in Washington state. I am particularly interested in exploring the connections between glaciers, climate, people, plants and animals. Personal experience, scientific research, and conversations with occupants of this landscape shape the stories I share through printmaking.

Photograph by Torsten Brinkema

 My final piece from fall semester is a tall scroll. The print leads the eye through a cascade of characters, composed and layered in such a way as to encourage an entangled understanding of the place and its players. There is a perched raven, a ghostly salmon and a river of jumbled sediment. Each has unique character but is also defined by their relationships to the others around them. Opening oneself to the worlds of these many inhabitants, the viewer is embedded in the complex web of lives and textures that comprise the North Cascades.

In this scroll, I toy with different narratives that surround glacial landscapes – glaciers as a biome, a laboratory, a playground, a pristine wilderness, and a vanishing one. Ice is an interesting environment to explore the relationship between people, “wilderness” and the climate catastrophe. With this first scroll, my hope was simple: that the beauty and whimsy of alpine life as I portray it can inspire people to learn from and care for these places. Appreciating the “beautiful now” in spite of uncertain and dimly framed end-times is a hopeful act, one that sows the seeds for striving for a better future. 

Photograph by Torsten Brinkema

 As in previous years, my printmaking practice is entwined with environmental science. Creating art is a sounding board for the scientific topics and problems that I wrestle with. Equally as important, art is a way to place visual emphasis on what I find interesting, important, or simply observe around me. My prints are comprised of many layers: scientific specificity from data and maps, the physical intuition of carving or sketching, colors both realistic and imagined, free flowing line work, principles of ecology, the emotion of climate change and a shifting landscape. I hope that the viewer digs through these layers, finding some perspective and connections along the way. 

Looking forward, I am eager to proof the blocks and designs I made over winter break. These blocks range from specific (the effect of climate change on sub alpine tree species) to the abstract (tangles and portals). Experimenting with color and layering during the printing process will be fun. I also have drawings and photographs that I am eager to work on digitally and laser cut into wood or transfer to other printmaking media. 

 New species and stories have also entered my awareness. I am excited to show the story of the denning wolverine mother through new prints, for example. I will continue to craft images and narratives about snow-obligate species. Completing two more scrolls is one of my goals. Printing, cutting, pasting and composition are elements of my practice that I hope to work in expansively this final semester. New techniques and ambitions may alter my course in exciting ways. I will continue to seek a balance between unfettered creativity (Just DO!) with the semester’s demands for a polished body of work and integration with my environmental science thesis. As I continue to think about science and art as tools for communication, I am excited to hear what my peers think of my art- how it is read and felt. I am hoping that this semester’s critiques delve into technique, content, ideas, and how to improve. 

Scroll II

Relief and intaglio prints, collaged

Rives BFK, sekishu, and washi paper

22 x 80’’

Background on the elements of Scroll II.

Reading from the bottom up, or the top down, or from the middle out, this scroll tells several stories. Many small prints accumulate here as a testament to complex, beautiful moments on Easton Glacier and Mt. Baker from the summer of 2020. Scroll II is the first of three scrolls to be completed. Each focuses on a different time period and set of narratives.

Raven surveys the watershed from the high reaches of the volcano. The Deming Icefall splinters below.

Each of the five animals in this print are made up of shapes that were inspired by the patterns of snow melting off of the glacier’s blue ice. Although they rise from a common source, each animal has their own character and story.

Two scientists “go fishing”. They lower a weighted and metered rope into a deep crevasse on the Easton Glacier.

By collecting data on snow depth, the team can calculate the mass balance of the glacier. In a good year, thick snow insulates the glacier from melt and there isn’t much bare ice to be seen. The rope sinks 3, 4, 5, meters down into the snow-topped crevasse before reaching the glacier ice. To stay healthy, the glacier needs to retain snow over 65-70% of its area. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad years when snow vanishes from much more of the glacier.

During their annual field work, the team also keep tabs on other glacier responses to climate change, such as streamflow, crevasse depth, and the location of the glacier terminus.

This tricolored puzzle has the texture of a frothing glacial creek. But the shapes show something much more macro: watersheds. These are the three forks of the Nooksack River.

The three forks drain the area west and south of Mt. Baker. Of the forks, the North is fed by many glaciers, the Middle by a few, and the South no longer receives any glacial melt. Anadromous fish, including the five species of Pacific salmon, thrive in habitat created and maintained by glaciers and glacial melt. Will the salmon of the South Fork of the Nooksack soon be ghosts? And what will happen when a piece of the puzzle goes missing? Fortunately, dam removals and stream restoration (including planting hundreds of trees and engineering dozens of new log jams) are giving the fish places to go in a warming world.

The stream rips downhill, across vacant moraines, through meadows and into the lush forest.

The cold water carries nutrients and organic carbon that sustain ecosystems. It can be rich in glacial flour, the fine sediment that diffracts light in such a way that lakes and streams appear milky green or brown. I envision the stream and its sediment nourishing trees, fish, marmots and flowers on its journey to the sea.

Meadow, Pika, Ellipsis.

The active pika collects mouthfuls of alpine grasses and flowers. She doesn’t hibernate, so she survives off of foraged haypiles throughout the winter. Pika live in talus fields, using rocks as a pantry and a shelter. They temperature sensitive, and can die when exposed to much more than 70° F. This animal considers her next move: Move up into the empty moraine? Will there be flowers?

Organizations and Research Teams:

North Cascades Glacier Climate Project

Long-term monitoring program for North Cascades glaciers

Nooksack Tribe Natural & Cultural Resources Department

Stewarding cultural, water and fisheries resources in the Nooksack

Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association

Working hard to improve salmon habitat in the Nooksack watershed

View from the studio, printing one block one hundred ways…

I proofed each of my blocks in different colors, on different papers, and in different layers to build up a library of pieces that I could assemble for Scroll II and the accompanying test scrolls. For this project I used around 20 blocks/plates made of wood, copper and acrylic.

Photo by Sarah Morgan

Easton Doodles

These are various iterations of my Easton Glacier woodblocks. The two layers of images 2, 5 and 6 started out as sketches, which I manipulated in Illustrator and Photoshop, then laser cut into plywood. From there, I printed woodcuts the traditional way, with ink and a press. Finally, scanned those prints and relayered and colored the scans digitally.

Prints 1 and 2 are inspired by the colors of wildfire smoke.

Prints 3 and 4 are experiments with color, fresh off the printing press.

Prints 5 and 6 are just for kicks.