Scroll I

Digging into the glacial history of the North Cascades, I created Scroll I. This is a configuration of prints along the theme of Mountain Evidence. It copies the structure of Scroll II, but touches on more moments and perspectives from the past. Here I include images of this piece and statements excerpted from my thesis.

Scroll I: Mountain Evidence. 22x80 inches, relief woodcut, relief acrylic, pen, collage and chine-collé on paper, 2021. Photograph by Torsten Brinkema

To understand the history of glaciers and how people have understood them in the North Cascades, I look to the archives. Ice is an archive itself. It holds information about past climates and is thus understood as a laboratory for Western scientists. A collection of historical documents and pictures form another archive, telling us about the past from the perspectives of explorers, scientists and mountaineers. Scroll I renders these archives with traditional woodcuts printed in blacks and bright blues. A cascade of evidence flows down the paper. The scientific dimensions unfold through “loss books”, bathymetric profiles and topographic maps. Histories of subsistence, climate science, recreation and territorial claims abut and overlap one another, all framed by the unique North Cascades landscape. 

My investigation of the North Cascades led me to many interesting accounts, photographs and renderings of glacial history in the North Cascades. This archive inspired the print Scroll I and the “remnants” composing it, including Glacier Women. Like my other scrolls, the individual elements that make up the tall composition carry stories of their own. For some pieces of the prints, I replicated quotes from explorer’s diaries and figures from published scientific articles. Acknowledging the biases in what information is retained in the archive, I also leaned on my imagination to image the histories and experiences of people besides the white men in the roles of explorers, politicians and scientists that appear in the history books. Although depicting history was very different from depicting the future, I found myself speculating a surprising amount within both themes. 

Detail from top of Scroll I. Photograph by Torsten Brinkema.

Two of the unique printmaking elements nestled within Scroll I are “loss books” and handwritten quotes. The loss books are stacks of paper pinned through the larger print at their top edge. Each page has a cut out of the glacier’s perimeter for a given year, adapted from maps and aerial images from USGS and NCGCP. Inspired by Maya Lin’s Disappearing Bodies of Water: Arctic Ice, these two-and-a-half dimensional flipbooks show the diminishing glacier bodies of the Lyman Glacier and the South Cascade Glacier over time. 

The handwritten quotes were transcribed from Fred Beckey’s book Range of Glaciers(2003) and represent early settlers’ and explorers’ impressions of the North Cascades. I also draw from Østrem’s (1966) handbook for glacier measurements and The North Cascades: Finding Beauty and Renewal in the Wild Nearby(Dietrich and Snyder 2014).While these quotes illuminate interesting points of view, many others have traversed this landscape. The voices of women are not well represented in the archive, so I fabulated perspectives with the pair of Glacier Women prints. One is based on an image taken in 1910 of a women’s mountaineering expedition to Glacier Peak. The other is an imagined scene of women and children harvesting berries. History may be written by the victors, but it can also be reimagined and re-depicted.

Remnants related to Scroll I: Mountain Evidence. Woodcut relief and handwritten script, 2021.

Exhibition: Visualizing the Range of Glaciers

Well, I’ve done it. I plotted, printed and pasted together a solo exhibition with four original Scrolls and four enlarged “elements” of my prints mounted on foam board. The show was created with funding and support from the Colby ES department. My pieces hung in the Diamond Building at Colby College in Waterville, Maine from April 23-May 14th, 2021. Diamond houses environmental science, government, economics, anthropology and other departments, so a variety of people brushed by these prints. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, they were only viewable by Colby students, faculty and staff.

I’ll let these images speak for themselves. Many thanks to my friend Torsten Brinkema for photographing the exhibition.

Visualizing the Range of Glaciers, thesis exhibition at Colby College. 2021.

Photograph by Torsten Brinkema

Exhibition Poster

Wolverine Scroll

Detail of Scroll I

Scrolls I-III

S. Cascade Glacier Mobile

Hallway Viewers

Portal, 2021 and its happy creator. This prints was enlarged from its original 8x10 inches to 40x50 inches.

Wolverines

Gulo-gulo on the move

The concept:

Only 30-40 wolverines (Gulo gulo) populate the North Cascades. These are incredible animals (Mustelidae) that can travel great distances through the mountains. They are a snow-obligate species, meaning that they rely on snowpack for a portion of their lifecycle. For wolverines, it is their denning season, from February through May, that is their most vulnerable time. Diminishing spring snowpack due to climate change and human disturbance from vehicles or backcountry recreation threaten the wolverines at this time of year. This print shows one family of wolverines reacting to human disturbance and melt, and setting out to find new habitat.

Learn more from the Cascades Wolverine Project.

The print:

I began with a reduction cut - building layered, snowy habitat for the wolverine to tromp through. Then I sketched in the transient family of wolverines - first sleeping soundly, then becoming wary of human presence, and finally moving the den. I sliced apart these prints and surrounded them with other characters impacting the narrative - the trees and rock that generate habitat and the room for a den, the human footprint, chaotic assemblages of environment-people. I also incorporated woodcuts of the wolverine family. After pasting the major pieces together, I wove fragments of texture and color throughout the scene for something to keep it cohesive and lead the eye.