Deep Time is a body of work that began with images of ice cores and broadened to include other works responding to the sublime beauty and alarming imperilment of ice phenomena.
Ice cores are core samples of accumulations of snow and ice that record climate conditions over thousands of years. They are extracted by deep drilling into ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, high altitude glaciers, or mountaintops like Mount Kilimanjaro.
Similar to tree rings, ice cores are natural recorders of climate. However, the span of time captured in ice cores far surpasses that in tree rings, since ice cores can reconstruct climate conditions extending up to nearly eight-hundred-thousand years into the past (in the case of the 3000 meter EPICA* ice core). Bubbles of ancient air, dust, ash from volcanic eruptions, and even small meteorites are trapped in these recrystallized layers of frozen water. Modern events such as the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the passage of the Clean Air Act are also evident in the ice core record.
The 19th-century American landscape painter Frederic Church risked his life to paint oil sketches of a calving iceberg from a boat off the coast of Labrador for his monumental painting of 1861, The Icebergs: or, The North. The “supernatural splendors” as he put it, of the arctic landscape, embodied the combination of terror and beauty that defines the sublime. At the dawn of the 21st century, the arctic itself is in peril, as glacial melting occurs at alarming rates around the globe. In the Glacial Ghost and Melt Lake images in this exhibition, the gradual dissolution of form becomes a metaphor for the melting and ultimate loss of glaciers.
* European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica
Liz Ward
October 18, 2010