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.

DATE: 2016-onwards

MATERIALS: granite, ice, clay, landscape

SCALE: programmatic thread

DIMENSIONS: variable

SITE: various sites in the Laurentian Great Lakes region

STATUS: ongoing

The following works belong to the programmatic thread of An Attempt To Understand A Glacier Without Ever Having Seen One:

• Coming To Terms With My Glacial Now (ongoing performance)

• Remember For This Stone A Colder Past (haptic installation)

• This Stone Wants To Go Home (ongoing expedition-scale performance)

• FIELD OFFICE (landscape observatory)

• 3.1 Nautical Miles Through The Laurentide Ice Sheet (video)

• Gowganda Tillite Shattered By Plow (object)

• Reconstructed Granite Boulder (object)

• Clearance Cairns (object)

• Resetting The Glacial Field (program)

• Lines Of Descent (body of work)

• The Landscape Into Which I Was Born (VR environment)

• Implements For Future Glacial Scouring (ongoing program)*

• Glacial Tills Of The Great Lakes (program)

• Future Tide Pools (sub-program)

• Pushing An Erratic Just A Little Farther (video)

• Pencils For Glaciers (body of work)

• Land Shaper (video)

• Pavement (body of work)

• Listening To Grooves (video)

• Alphorn With Erratics (object)

• Land Plane (performance)