Animated Drawings for a Glacier  pairs glacial landscapes on opposite coasts of the US: icebergs calved from the Kennicott Glacier, Alaska, and boulders transported on ice to the shore of Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, by the Laurentide Ice Sheet over 10,000 years ago.

The project began as a visceral response to encountering the visual and sonic power of glaciers in Alaska, while attempting to grasp the vast geological timescale of their motion and earth-carving force. Based on research into and direct observation of glaciers, I created six charcoal drawings on site in the Wrangell St. Elias National Park & Preserve. As I drew, I paused to photograph the drawing every few marks to document a stop-motion video of the process, as an evocation of the constant evolution of glaciers and their surrounding landscapes. Each drawing reflects the features and formation of a glacier: marks of accumulation, fracture, flow, and change, echoing and titled after the poetic terms used by glaciologists — ablatation, crevasse, firn, moraine, ogive. 

Subsequently in the 10 pm Alaskan twilight, I hiked to project the Animated Drawings onto glacial ice a few miles north of a former mining town, with just a battery-powered projector, tripod, and a cell phone for my theater. I considered these illuminated acts an opportunity tell the glacier of the story back to itself with a small audience. My intention was to keep the process unintrusive to each landscape, while shedding light on the tremendous past and future power of the glacier to shape and reform the world we have known.

I repeated these small performances for groups of intrepid hikers, and, over time, a surprising yet meaningful pairing emerged with a distant and seemingly different landscape: the shoreline of my home state of Massachusetts, whose geology is carved by the onset and retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last ice age. What I marveled at in distant Alaska once blanketed and shaped the seemingly quotidian landscapes I know intimately today. To parallel the screenings in Alaska, I projected the same six Animated Drawings on the large boulders that dot the coast of the Cuttyhunk Island, once the site of the moraine (or terminus) of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, to illuminate a shared story across space and time.

Now the Kennicott Glacier retreats rapidly, and Cuttyhunk is one of the many coastal communities threatened by the sea level rise caused by melting ice.