Currently Tracing the slow drift of ice & stone over the Glaciated landscapes of the Great Lakes & Slowly Making mY Way North to the Arctic Circle.

Research Services

  • Comparative Studies

    from inventories, to deep observational studies of land use, to site audits for recreational programming

  • Forensic Landscape Analysis

    in the Great Lakes region with an emphasis on clay and stone quarries to support your reclamation efforts

  • Finding Stories in Data

    while developing new ways to communicate through mapping protocols, sample collection, & reporting

Let’s work together

Expedition

I found this 38lb granite glacial erratic while hiking in Ohio. Now I’m attempting THIS STONE WANTS TO GO HOME, an expedition to reunite it with the last remnant of ice on Baffin Island (background) in the Arctic Circle, the final fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the continental glacier that shaped North America, first moving this stone south during the last ice age.

ARCHIVE

AN ARCHIVE, LIKE A GLACIER, PRESERVES LAYERS OF TIME; ACCUMULATING, COMPRESSING, AND REVEALING TRACES OF PROGRESS.

MY ARCHIVE, ACQUIRED BY THE NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART IN 2021, HOLDS THESE ENDURING TRACES OF MY ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND A GLACIER WITHOUT EVER HAVING SEEN ONE.

statement

I work to understand glaciers in their absence, through the traces they have left in the Great Lakes region where I live. I don’t have much of a choice but to imagine them. There is a reverence of the unseen and I try to understand it in ways that end up feeling like ritual. Replicating glacial behaviors, mimicking glacial processes, mapping the glacial movement of stones and clay, recreating glacial functions at human scale, playing with the possibilities at a landscape scale, and bridging across time to connect ice ages from the deep past with ice ages of the deep future. The work I produce and the tools I build prime actual landscapes for collaborative activation in the deep future when my objects will yield to the geologic force of the next glacier in the next ice age.

ObjectS

Another way that I work to understand glaciers and geography is through the production of hand tools that mimic geologic processes. I design and build these tools to produce sculptural works that I have exhibited internationally. Much of this work is included in my archive at the Nevada Museum of Art. Beyond geologic topics, my expanded portfolio includes works on paper, and in wood & metal.

BIO

RYAN DEWEY works in sculpture, research, and land art, looking at connections between people, places, and land use to produce a kind of ecological dreaming. Donna Haraway has called his work one of her favorite examples of art about the anthropocene in her book Staying With The Trouble. His archive is housed at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. He has lived on several islands, in several jungles, in one desert, on one mountain, and on two of the five Great Lakes. He is a member of the American Society of Polar Philatelists and has received residencies at ACRE (Chicago), the Alps Art Academy (Switzerland), and the Montello Foundation (Nevada), as well as serving two appointments as visiting researcher in cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University where he wrote the open-access book Hack the Experience: New Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (Punctum Books, 2018).

SUBSCRIBE

Explore deep time with FIELD OFFICE, my Substack on glacial history and its lasting impact. Follow my research and creative process as I prepare an expedition to return a glacial erratic to its Arctic origins, tracing ice-shaped stories from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Circle. Subscribe to join the journey and discover our planet’s icy past and future.