FIELD
OFFICE
F/O
Where my work begins and returns, before becoming anything else.
A roving practice across islands, waterways, quarries, and working landscapes.
FIELD OFFICE is a landscape observatory focused on the past, present, and future role of glaciers in the Great Lakes region.
F/O is the operational core of my practice. It is where I engage land directly, observe my surroundings, and exist in place over long durations. Curiosity guides the work. Time is the method. Regions, rather than sites, become the scale at which understanding accumulates.
FIELD OFFICE is not a client-facing division. It is a grounding hub that informs everything else I do.
The purpose of FIELD OFFICE is to cultivate understanding through repeated, sustained observation of environments and systems. It is a space for developing methods of attention, perception, and long-duration inquiry, and for maintaining continuity across time, season, and landscape. What emerges here informs all other divisions of my practice, including STUDIO, DRIFT CABINET, GEOCOG, and ANGLING DIVISION.
FIELD CONDITIONS
The observatory unfolds across varied landscapes that are revisited over time so that processes, patterns, and change can be understood as they emerge.
These include the Lake Erie archipelago (inset) and surrounding coastal systems, Great Lakes watersheds and tributaries, northern Michigan glacial terrain, Ohio peatlands and bogs, quarries and post-industrial landscapes, Arctic and sub-Arctic ice fields, and southern wetlands and cypress swamps.
Return is central. Repeated presence allows observation to accumulate, making long-term change legible rather than episodic.
Methodology
The work is slow and direct. It involves walking, waiting, and sustained engagement with landscapes. Observation is sequenced through sketching, measurement, and logging. Materials are collected as records of pattern and change.
Glacial, fluvial, industrial, and ecological traces are read together, and insights are synthesized to inform conceptual, artistic, and scientific work elsewhere in the practice.
Field methods conducted on-site build high-fidelity attested datasets as a core aspect of my practice.
EXPEDITION READINESS
FIELD OFFICE is also where expeditionary skills are developed and tested.
Training happens in parallel with fieldwork—navigation, logistics, documentation, and remote operations are practiced under real conditions, then refined over time. The training covers shown here mark readiness and return, recording preparation as part of the work itself rather than something separate from it.
OUTPUT ARTIFACTS
FIELD OFFICE produces field notebooks, ground-truthed data sets, sketches, diagrams, instruments, photographs, measured drawings, and archival materials that feed into DRIFT CABINET and other internal structures. Some of this work circulates publicly. Much of it remains internal, serving as the substrate for thinking, making, and advising across divisions. What follows are some of the outputs produced over the past several seasons. The complete archive of outputs is stewarded by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art under record CAE2217.
Photogrammetric data reconstructs glacial grooves at sub-centimeter scale; mesh used for hypothesis testing and diachronic comparison. Built from data I collected on Kelleys Island in Lake Erie.
Glacial Grooves Mesh Model
41.616338559191945, -82.70649799527524 | Kelleys Island, Ohio | 2022–2025
Forensic-scale 3D photogrammetry reconstructs primary and secondary glacial grooves at sub-centimeter resolution, producing a high-fidelity mesh (3.8M vertices, 7.6M faces) for basin-scale analysis. Systematic cross-section, historical overlays, and site analysis recover lost groove morphology erased by quarrying, map erosional trajectories, and locate state-change markers. This work situates the grooves within Lake Erie’s broader glacial system, testing how erosive forces evolved across substrates and revealing the grooves as signals of planetary-scale movement. Data are integrated into an ongoing project archive at the Nevada Museum of Art, informing a comprehensive terrain-based understanding.
Postal Field Records
FIELD OFFICE maintains a parallel archive through the postal system.
Postcards and expeditionary covers are issued as timecards: stamped, written, and mailed from the field. Each records location, date, conditions, and activity, functioning as field logs, proof of presence, serialized dispatches, and portable archives.
In the tradition of QSL cards, DX-peditions, paquebots, and polar cachets, the postal system preserves movement, return, and duration in material form.
Some records enter institutional archives, others return to the studio, some remain in circulation, and a limited number are available for collection.
Member, American Society of Polar Philately (admitted 2023).
When I began FIELD OFFICE I also began dispatching postcards from the field as a kind of time card. A limited number of subscribers received boxed sets of cards, and an edition entered my studio archive, and the archive for my project at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.
Here’s a selection of cards that I produce on behalf of F/O:
Material Entering Circulation
Work conducted through FIELD OFFICE produces a material record of in situ research. This includes field notebooks and site diagrams, photographs and measured drawings, expeditionary postcards and printed covers, DRIFT CABINET materials and artifacts, and the instruments and tools developed through use in the field. The work also generates ground-truthed data that feeds GEOCOG analysis, along with installation concepts and land-based proposals that emerge from sustained presence in place. Some of this material becomes publicly available, some informs consulting and advisory work, and much of it quietly shapes what the studio produces next.
This ongoing project collects glacial clay samples across the Great Lakes, processes them into oil paints, and paints sets of gummed stamps for catalog cards outlining site and details of the deposit, an index of the variation of glacial clay across the region.
How FIELD OFFICE relates to the practice network
Everything that comes out of my practice originates from a FIELD OFFICE inquiry.
STUDIO work takes shape
1
DRIFT CABINET accumulates material
2
ANGLING DIVISION tools & models are tested
3
GEOCOG frameworks are grounded
4
CONTACT FIELD OFFICE