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                                           ⚈ On Water and Time /

                                                       ┆ a glacier leaves a deep cut

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The glacier heaves over the land, gouging into the bedrock
under the force of its own weight. It has spent centuries accumulating ice and snow,
compressing and holding, reshaping the surface of the earth. Its body is a shifting
beast of dark blue crevasses, running meltwater and fractured ice streams. Its
constant internal deformations fuel its movement as it
slowly expands and recedes—breathing.

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What began as a trickle of words into this landscape, became
a flood of language and cyclical exchanges of ideas between us.
For the last five years, since I first wrote an experimental
    response to Ellen’s images,
            we have layered poetry
              on photography
             on glassy rods
on essays
on water___
on voices__
on light__
on time.

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                                                                                    Of Rock and Ice 

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Together, we’re searching for an imagined
Consciousness in nature—or a way to capture what we
already know is there, a mournful post-apogee slithering of rock
and ice. In dialogue with each other, and with the glacier,
we speak back and forth about deep time and its
effects within the interiority of the ice,
and on its thawing surface.

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  How can we translate this dialogue?

We are entering the glacier itself, while also viewing it from afar.
We hear it crackling and softening, and understand the
     ephemerality of its immense strength. For Ellen, she
                   overlays vastly different scales of images on top of and
alongside each other._____________
The line of the horizon__________
becomes the lip of a blue crevasse
                 becomes the glacial striations revealed by the
                                                                                       retreating ice.

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For me, I attempt to draw out stories from within the ice,
even as it shifts away from us. Often, as words settle, they want
to form a rigid logic for the world. My task is to preserve these fragile
translations as propositions, or possibilities, instead. Poetry is
not a limiter or a rule, it is orienting us in the right direction,
then pushing us forwards on our first step into the ether.

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                                         ⚈ On Water and Time
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It is this poetry that forms the foundation of Ellen’s two-channel
video work, On Water and Time. The written poem on the left,
a glacier leaves a deep cut, is one I wrote in 2022.
She responded to its heavy, corporeal language,
and its use of a countdown that shifts from

geological time scales into

human time scales into

zero

to curate the flow of
still and moving images.

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In response to these image selections, I wrote an ‘expansion’ of the
original 2022 poem (which we began to refer to as ‘the core’) as a
series of stanzas designed to slot in between each existing line.
 

If the core is looking back
from a desolate future,

the expansion is the solitary breath in,           
                      looking forward before collapse.           

A voice whispers despairingly,
guiding you through a landscape

                        that is crumbling apart            

           at the molecular level            

across all moments in time.

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Time will always be slippery across such scales. A glacier’s movement is slow,
and geological time seems incomprehensible when millennia are reduced to
millimetres in an extracted core. While photography is an incision into this
slow time—we can only look backwards from this point. How do these
scales tell us how long a glacier took to form, or how long until it
will take to melt away completely?
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Blue Core ⚈_________
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Ice cores, drilled and extracted from glaciers, afford scientists a way to time travel.
Unpicking centuries of compressed ice creates invaluable archives of
environmental and human history.

pollen                                ash

radioactive dust                C02

methane                         argon
 

Materials and gasses found in cores help create global climate models, charting the
impacts of entire epochs, and more recent events like the Industrial Revolution.

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Rain is frozen into ice crystals which fall as snow and
eventually compress to form ice, which in turn will one
day melt back into water. The glacier was always in constant
flux, but meltwater damage, exponentially expedited by a
warming planet, compromises this scientific work. We
cannot refreeze the fragile past. All will be lost if
we cannot preserve it.

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Even the low echoes of drips or rutted cliff faces slippery with
runoff become alarming with this knowledge. An ocean of the dissolved past moves
through us even as we attempt to hold it back. What could be written in response
to this feeling? I struggle to translate the surreality of what Ellen has confronted
with her lens without falling into dark ruminations and helplessness.

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                                        ⚈ Reducing Surfaces

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In resurfacing existing text, Reducing Surfaces is its own cyclical process,
                                        a reflection on language accretion over time. _____________
                               relying on the methodical dredging
                                                              of materials
                                           collected over years,
                              then allowing the text to
           take on a life of its own:

crawling_____________
                melting

spreading____
 
                       regenerating
 

It is the gentle snowfall on the glacier that will soon be compressed into the body.
It is a stalagmite calcifying over time from small but constant drips.

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On Water and Time / a glacier leaves a deep cut uncover counterpoints

                               and perspectives

      that emerge between

the scientific register and the intimate whisper,
 

between antipodean and arctic destruction,                 
 

between vastly different time scales

flowing in opposite directions.

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 The Precipice ⚈____________

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We have developed a secret language.
 

It is an accumulated language

    of the methodical picking

         apart of what has been             

          compressed over time.            

It is a distillation

   of geological imagination

and the inherent melancholy            

     of time passing.  

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It is a pocket of illusion, a circular frame, a recessed
light—it does not require a definition because you already
know what it's saying.

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We have already spoken this language to each other, at the edge of the world,
cupping hands over hands

                                  over hands

over hands

                      hands

                                                                        as meltwater rushes
                                                                                     through our grasping
                                                                 fingers.

                                                                                                                                          / a deep cut 

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