Downwaste

Downwaste is a series of cyanotypes made with the melting edge of glaciers in Glacier National Park. This body of work pictures glacial melt and responds to glaciers as active agents of ice, rock, and snow – indeed, the ways we imagine a glacier has significant impacts on the ground. Downwasting in glaciology refers to the thinning of a glacier due to the melting of ice. The term in this series references the site of the artwork's production while emphasizing the loss of these places due to anthropogenic climate change. Downwaste invites the viewer to think with glaciers as meaningful actors whose lives and death shape the physical and psychological landscapes that humans and ice depend upon and co-inhabit.

The works in Downwaste are approached as collaborations to emphasize the glaciers’ presence on the land and the threat of their disappearance. To make a cyanotype for Downwaste, I treat a sheet of paper with a solution that makes it receptive to light and material encounters. I hike the paper in a lightproof container through Glacier National Park to the melting edge of one of the twenty-six remaining glaciers. I place the paper into the glacial runoff and snow and distribute nearby rocks, ice chunks, and glacial silt handfuls across the receptive surface. Under the sun, the cyanotype is exposed, and the melting edge of a glacier draws itself.