painting with fire

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Newsletter more than a blog these days.

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Square painting of a retreating glacier from above

Sunday, March 21, 2021

A journal of my plague year

In March of 2020 I was in Florida finishing up a residency and headed home just as things started to blow up and lock down with the pandemic. It was a very strange time to be finishing my MFA - writing a thesis while locked down meant time for many more drafts! Then in the fall my cohort pulled off the impossible and managed an in-person MFA exhibition. Of course our campus at the University of Hartford was closed to anyone not affiliated with the university community but the silver lining was putting together a robust online exhibition which you can see here.

Since graduating I've been home working, writing grants and proposals and getting ready for my next big residency in the Arctic Circle this fall. This residency was postponed for a year but does look to be going forward in October. So in the midst of making work in the studio, curating some exhibitions (more about those in a future post) and waiting - seems like the main thing we've all been doing is waiting - I'm crowdfunding my climate focused trip on a tall ship in the far north.

One thing this wretched year has highlighted has been the challenge of watching enormous amounts of terrible events with little to no power to make them better. I'm one of the lucky ones with no risk of being homeless or hungry and it's still been a horrendously painful year. Heartbreaking for so many and hard to hold onto gratitude but I'm trying.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Shimmering

Empty channels, Slims River, shredded scientific papers, resin & pigment on panel, 33" x 66"

I sit in isolation, looking at a grey sky and high winds, reading apocalyptic news about the pandemic and thinking about the idea of a “a protocol of joy.” In February - or approximately 300 years ago - I was in Miami for an artist-in-residence as part of my MFA program. We worked with Miccosukee artist, activist and ordained minister Houston Cypress, who taught us about approaching life’s adversity through a protocol of joy and finding the shimmer of beauty and impermance in the world. Riding the airboat across the Everglades on a sunny day watching waterbirds seems impossibly long ago in a far more innocent time. I understood joy and absorbing the shimmering quality of the place in that moment. It took me back to growing up on the shore of Lake Michigan where I would go to the lakeshore and watch the light play across the water, listening to the wind and the birds. The light still shimmers on days less grey and threatening than today and I hope my joy will return when the pandemic wanes and our days are not full of stories of suffering and death, incompetence and malevolence.

For now I think shimmering and long for the simple beauty of light on water. Soon the days will warm again and I will take my kayak out on the water and enjoy the shimmer on the Huron River. I love the light on water - so insubstantial and changing - inspiring me to thoughts of peace, escape, meditation on ever-changing impermanence. I’ve long focused on it in my work and sit surrounded by my paintings of it.

Wingaersheek Ripples I, Archival inkjet and encaustic on paper, 16" x 20" framed

Today I think of, reach for, a protocol of joy and it eludes me. I am lucky - secure housing, full pantry. I look out at a garden full of daffodils and greenhouse and cold-frame sheltering seedlings. I walk in the woods, reveling in the beauty of early spring - the shimmer on the little streams and the bigger river. The shimmer will continue no matter whether we are there to watch it. It makes me think of the land acknowledgements we do to thank those who came before us and how they respected and nurtured the land. Here in southeast Michigan that would be the Anishinabek and Potawatomi peoples. Respecting their lifeways would be a good start on helping the planet recover from our industrial, consumptive voracity. Perhaps the silver (shimmering?) lining of this pandemic is the land having time to heal a bit from our industriousness.

Mississippi Flow, encaustic monotype on kozo, 72" x 17"

I was thinking about how to find joy and beauty in these times when I read a friend’s blog. She is a young mother living with metastatic lung cancer. She wrote that living with cancer and living with this era of Coronavirus have a lot in common:

"Who knows what things will be like in a month or even a week? Think smaller. Think about this day, this hour, maybe even this minute. I am breathing. There is sunshine. I can hear a bird….I like to call my next strategy Grief and Gratitude.

Make sure to let yourself grieve.
….Take time to honor and grieve for it all….

This may be harsh, but living with my diagnosis has taught me that what you have is THIS. Right now. This time IS your time. Don’t wish it away. What you have now might BE the good days. So enjoy what you can of THIS."

I think she is right - find the shimmer in the now, live in the present, acknowledging the past, hoping for the future as we live poised on the edge of I don’t know what.

We are all alone together, encaustic monotype and mixed media on paper, 9" x 9"

Interested in the land acknowledgement I mentioned? Look here. Interested in finding out about whose land you live on? Check out Native Land.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Exhibition at Michigan Medicine coming up

Shrines & Reliquaries: Memorializing Climate

November 12, 2019

Work by Leslie Sobel will be featured in Michigan Medicine’s ongoing exhibit Gifts of Art: Bringing the World of Art & Music to Michigan Medicine. For her series, Shrines & Reliquaries: Memorializing Climate, Sobel created mixed-media boxes meant to capture memories of places being altered by climate change. She drew inspiration from Tibetan iconography as well as her time as artist in residence at Kluane National Park in Yukon Territory, Canada where in 2017 she camped on an icefield with a group of climate scientists.The small boxes utilize paint, monotype, photography, resin and encaustic to invoke complex ideas and emotions that one can hold in their hands.
Shrines & Reliquaries: Memorializing Climate
December 16, 2019 – March 6, 2020
Open daily from 8:00am – 8:00pm
Gifts of Art Gallery – Taubman Health Center South Lobby, Floor 1
1500 E. Medical Center Drive
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Climate Change Game, mixed media in found box, ~3" x 16" x 2"

Kaskawulsh Descent, mixed media in found box

Mountain Shrine, encaustic in found box

Mountain Silhouette, mixed media in found box

Sheep Mountain & Kluane Lake, mixed media in found box

Monday, March 18, 2019

Materiality - resin and mixed media

Ever since my residency on the Eclipse Icefield I’ve been exploring ways to make work about climate in different ways. I’ve also started working in resin in the last year and it seems a natural material to explore ideas about melt and the change in lakes, glaciers and watersheds associated with climate change.

Kluane Lake Resin cast - resin and kozo with acrylic and pigment, ~24" x 50" ©2910

I’ve done a number of small, exploratory pieces as I work with resin as well - letting me try different techniques combining it with glass, metallic and other pigments and collage elements. Resin for me turns out to be a wonderful unifier of other media, pulling disparate elements together in what can end up a more polished, cohesive whole.

In the course of my explorations Art Resin gave me a small sample to play with. Support is nice as it’s not an inexpensive material and my larger pieces can go through quite a bit of it. I like their particular formulation - it’s non-toxic, doesn’t heat up as much as some other epoxies while curing and has been pretty easy to work with. I should add I have zero interest in working with anything but the non-toxic varieties of resin. My studio is in my home and material safety is an important concern.

Friday, July 7, 2017

My adventures on the Eclipse Icefield

Now that I’ve been back for a while I have had a chance to digest the experience. I got back to a family crisis and have been utterly subsumed in caregiving - which has made re-entry challenging and follow-up work temporarily impossible. Now that things are more under control I’m back to work! So a long recap with lots of details about the day to day life on the ice but also loads of pix.

There were five of us on this trip - Seth Campbell, Karl Kreutz and two grad students -Will Kochtitzky and Brittany Main - and me. Seth works largely with ground penetrating radar for his research. His long time scientific partner and senior scientist Karl Kreutz takes snow samples and ice cores to do chemical analysis to date when snow fell in what amount and where the moisture came from. Karl is a professor at the University of Maine - which is one of the four institutions Seth currently works with - the life of a scientist funded by soft money is complex to say the very least.

Will and Brittany are both PhD students - Will working with Karl at the University of Maine and Brittany at the University of Ottawa.

I flew into Whitehorse in the Yukon via Seattle and Vancouver. It turned out that Seth, Karl and Will were all on my flight so we connected in the terminal and hauled a big pile of gear out to a rental vehicle and on to the hotel where Brittany was already ensconced. The next two days were spent shopping - for groceries, maps, some bits of gear various people needed and so forth. Then Tina picked us up in her giant van and drove us 100km up to the Kluane Lake Research Station - talking all the way about the people, history and flora and fauna of the area. Her family has been in the area for generations and I learned a lot listening to her about the Yukon. On the way we passed what would be the only bear sighting of the trip - a small golden colored grizzly bear digging for roots on the side of the Alaska Highway.

At Kluane Lake Research Station (KLRS) we spent a couple days assembling gear for the flights in. This involved setting up new tents to make sure all bits were there, testing stoves, re-packing personal and scientific gear from travel mode to back-country mode (stuff has to be checked on commercial flights and fit in tiny back-country plane) and assembling food while discarding as much excess packaging as possible. Meal planning and assembling was largely Will’s job and we did NOT go hungry!

A little about the Kluane Lake Research Station where we staged and where I spent more time after getting off the ice. KLRS is now run by the Arctic Institute of North America. It has a mix of housing, dining hall, work space, lab space and storage for the various research groups that operate there - most of whom are there for relatively brief stints but may need to store gear the rest of the year. It runs along Kluane Lake and is separated from Icefield Discovery by the width of a gravel air strip. The Icefield Discovery folks run both a field camp on the ice and a pair of small nimble planes to transport researchers, climbers and sight-seers in and out of the St Elias Mountains including Mt Logan - the latter being the tallest mountain in Canada and the most massive in the world. They do logistical support for many different groups in the field. All of our flights in and out were flown by Tom Bradley- whose calm demeanor would make the most nervous flier relaxed. The little planes he and Sherpal Singh fly would take us 1 or 2 at a time plus up to 750 pounds of gear (including our weight).

Flying in took three trips. Seth and Karl went in first with essential camping gear and food. One rule of this sort of expedition is that no one flies in without survival necessities - which makes excellent sense when you think about it. Brittany and Will flew in next with more camping gear and whatever science stuff fit. I came in last with my personal gear and all the rest of the science gear. The science gear included multiple ground penetrating radar set-ups since both Seth and Brittany had their own and the needed equipment to drill ice cores and store samples for later analysis. (I should mention that for this trip Karl was not keeping cores frozen but rather bringing back little sealed bag of samples - all meticulously labeled and logged - which were allowed to melt since he was doing chemical analysis only. Had he needed to keep cores frozen it would have been a much bigger production). Logging data carefully and labeling correctly is obviously critically important and very time consuming in the field. From all this you will gather we did not travel light!

Landing on the icefield

When my turn to go came it took more than an hour for Tom, Sherpal and Lance (mechanic extraordinaire) to play a complex game of tetris to get all the remaining gear in the plane. Then an errant gust of wind snapped a hinge on the pilot’s door so Lance calmly took the door off and attached a new hinge-plate. When I arrived 2 hours later than expected camp was all assembled with cook tent dug in and latrine ready, all tents but mine set.

That skips over the flight in - which was one of the high points of the trip for me. Kluane Lake is - or rather - was - fed by the Slims (trad. A'ay Chu) River) which used to flow out of the Kaskawulsh Glacier. Last summer the glacier receded far enough that it changed where it drains so the river no longer feeds the lake but rather flows in an entirely different channel to the Bering Sea. As a result the lake level has dropped more than a meter leaving boat ramps high and dry. The lake is quite deep - maybe 160 meters so from an ecosystem standpoint this is not yet disastrous but it is a problem for the local fishermen who can no longer easily put into the lake and many First Nations people count on that for at least part of their living. So I was very interested to fly over the river and Kaskawulsh outflow and to photograph it.

Mostly empty Slims River channels

The flights in and out were very dramatic. The St Elias Mountains are both extremely tall and rugged - and very massive. I had watched a fair amount of video of flights in them but of course experiencing it was far more intense as the little plane bounced on the wind. I’m not a particularly nervous flier but was happy to be flying with someone as vastly experienced as Tom. After almost an hour's flight and about 160 kilometers through the mountains we abruptly dropped over a ridge and landed.

2 arms of the Kaskawulsh Glacier

Above icefields

Our campsite on the Eclipse Icefield was essentially in a shallow bowl surrounded by good sized peaks including Mt Donjek and Mt Badham. Seth and Karl have been returning to this area for a number of years to gather data. It’s a relatively safe, sheltered glacier at 10,000 feet - a good place to train people in the requisite skills to do radar and ice core work and glacier camping. Neither Will nor Brittany were the kind of novice I am but Brittany commented to me that a PhD in glaciology is in part an apprenticeship in both field and research skills. Seth in particular is a deeply expert teacher of the kind of wilderness skills required to work in extreme settings and I am deeply grateful for his and Karl’s willingness to take me along.

Camp with view obscured by snow

Seth helped me set up my tent, imparting some key information along the way. I’m an experienced backpacker although most of my backpacking is in the desert. There are some key differences about setting up a tent on an ice field 750 meters deep! For starters we don’t use normal tent stakes but 2 foot long pieces of bamboo with climbing pickets at the corners. (A picket is a right angle length of aluminum with tie-down holes. It’s about 20 inches long and is a far more stable anchor than a stake). We used every tie-down attachment on the tent so that a big storm would be unlikely to tear the tent or break a pole. While we had a fair amount of snow and wind, Seth and Karl would experience far worse a few days later in more exposed location on Mt Logan and we heard from the pilots about 140 knot winds in that location destroying climbers’ tents.

Seth and camp - note large amount of science gear in center

You may be wondering how one sleeps in a tent on a glacier without freezing. The answer for me was sleeping ON two closed cell foam pads plus a thermarest and IN two nested sleeping bags with a liner and the tent itself was a 4 season tent. Add a hot water bottle and two layers of merino long johns and I was warm enough. Omitting one layer of long johns or the hot water bottle not being hot enough meant a chilly night. In the morning everything inside the tent has a layer of hoarfrost so clothing gets put away or kept in sleeping bags with one. I also slept with ALL of my camera batteries in the sleeping bag and my sunblock (so it would not freeze) and my headlamp. Yes it was lumpy!

This brings me to a general point about gear. The scientists all do multiple trips a year to this sort of environment. As a result they had specialty gear that I didn’t purchase because I was trying to make do with things I could re-use in less harsh environments. Examples of specialty gear include sleeping bags rated to minus 40, down filled pants and winter over-boots which go on top of ski or hiking boots. I had serious winter gear but not those items. I wore the aforementioned two layers of wool long underwear, a heavy wool sweater knitted for me by friend in Norway years ago, down sweater, down jacket and gore-tex shell when it was really cold. On the bottom went 2 layers of heavy wool hiking socks, soft shell pants over the wool long johns and gore-tex pants over that. I had winter hiking boots allegedly rated to -40 and added hand warmers between socks when needed (brought to keep batteries warm - all my camera batteries were carried in my inner pockets). I had a heavy Nepalese wool hat lined in fleece and a merino neck gaiter. When it was really cold I wore those and had my down hood up and my gore-tex shell hood up over that as well. In the afternoon it might be warm enough to just wear a baseball cap for several hours. The sun was up for 19 hours a day and it never got really dark but it definitely got a lot colder by late afternoon. I had a pair of windstopper gloves and heavy over-mittens (wore the latter as little as possible since they made it impossible to do anything precise like photography). My hands felt numb for days after getting off the ice but I did not have frostbite.

We didn’t get up early - waiting until 8 or so to get started on breakfast was warmer and melting enough snow to make hot drinks and cook took a while. So a typical day would start with something hot to drink - instant coffee for a junkie like me and tea for non-addicts. Breakfast was oatmeal or pancakes. If the weather was cooperative the scientists would collect data. One day that was digging a deep pit to collect snow samples (stacked, going the entire 4 meter depth in the exact location they collected last year, marked by a tall pole which was mostly buried). I helped minimally with the digging - that was day 1 and the altitude was kicking my behind. Was impressed with everyone else’s ability to dig given the altitude. Other days they pulled radar arrays on sleds with skis. Except for skiing pretty near camp they went roped together wearing climbing harnesses. I didn’t have a harness or the right kind of skis so did not go on extended ski trips with them. One day we drilled ice cores - 17 meters worth if I remember right. Three and a half of our eight days on the Eclipse it snowed hard enough that we stayed put, reading, chatting in the kitchen tent or sleeping. One morning we had to dig out about 2 feet of snow but it didn’t snow and blow hard enough to require running lines between mess tent and sleeping tents or latrine. It was bitterly cold but I don’t really know exactly how cold since the thermometer I brought never budged from about 45 degrees F - which was obviously wrong! Lunch and dinner were both always hot meals. Sometimes quite elaborate meals - chicken curry, naan (go Will!), other times soup and grilled cheese but always hot with lots of carbs and lots of protein. We did NOT go hungry nor was it freeze dried camping food since we were flown in and out.

Will & Brittany digging one of multiple pits - to measure snow accumulation or for latrines - they did a lot of digging!

Science activities were different every day - some days were radar focused - skiing locally or longer distances towing sleds with several different radar arrays. Those sleds were quite heavy and when going any distance people were roped together for safety as well. A lot of time was spent collecting snow samples. How? One digs a deep pit (in the exact same spot as last year, marked by a tall pole and gps coordinates. Using a little square shovel one collects a precise 5cm cube of snow which gets bagged, labeled and logged. One day was focused on drilling ice cores. Each sample was carefully bagged and logged, drilling 17 meters down. The core drill is heavy and one hauls it back out of the hole with each core segment. And half the time the weather was uncooperative and snowed too hard to do anything so on good weather days the scientists worked like mad to get everything done. On bad days we stayed in.

Scientists heading off to collect radar data

Getting ready to ski with radar sled - note big packs and ropes connecting everyone

Will kept us in treats when the weather was bad

Seth and Karl enjoying Will's work products. Always a good plan to feed your PhD advisor well!

Brittany

hanging out in kitchen tent on a snowy day

skiing with radar

Snow coming in and dressed for colder conditions

It gets a lot colder later in the day

Scientists heading out for yet another data collection trip

The last full day we were at Eclipse the scientists all skied down and back up Donjek Glacier towing multiple radar arrays. They skied a round trip of 24 kilometers - roped together in climbing harnesses and towing heavy gear. I did not go since I was lacking the correct equipment. This was the one outing I did not regret not having the gear for - it was an extremely long, physically demanding day and they were all utterly spent when they got back. Being alone on the ice that day was magical and likely the most alone I will ever be. The four of them were the closest humans - anyone else was more than 100 kilometers away. There was no wind that day - it was utterly quiet - just me, mountain after mountain and the ice.

We stayed on the ice for one day longer than originally planned so that all the science objectives could be met. The original plan was that Seth and Karl would be flown to base camp on Mt Logan and Will, Brittany and I would fly out. Seth and Karl would be joined by Adam and Aaron to spend 3+ weeks on Mt Logan getting data and ideally summiting. From the get-go this was challenging. The forecast the day we flew out was a limited window before weather was coming. The Mt Logan campsite was far more exposed as mentioned earlier so Seth and Karl hunkered down on the Eclipse to wait out the storm. It took multiple days before it cleared enough for Adam and Aaron to join them and to move everyone and their gear to Mt Logan. Their entire time on the mountain was made difficult by lousy weather and they never did summit but they did get good data and everyone got out safely.

The day we flew out Will and Brittany flew out first with most of their gear. Tom came back for me and my stuff and kindly flew me around a bit more so I could do more photography.

More about the experience, my time at Kluane Lake Research Station and art-making in separate posts to come...

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Wilderness based science-inspired art and why I need to go

Anyone who has followed my work for any length of time knows about my deep interest and concern with climate change. My work has incorporated and been influenced by scientific images and data for many years over a variety of subject matters but especially since I've been making climate/environmentally focused work. And people who know me also know that I'm an avid hiker who loves to get out into the backcountry. People have asked me why I like to get into the field and what the relationship between that lived experience and scientific concepts have in my art-making.

There are a number of reasons. First and foremost is my need to connect a deep emotional experience with scientific understanding. I'm the daughter of two scientists in a family full of scientists so I grew up always expecting a scientific baseline to discussing things. I am not a technical illustrator nor do I want to just make graphs and charts. To make art about climate I need to experience it, be in it and see what we are losing as we do a variety of highly unhealthy things to the planet. (This is also where I acknowledge that habitat and species loss are also extremely problematic and are connected with climate issues - basically we are terrible stewards of this planet and it's not like we have a spare.)

In 2013 I did a month long residency at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument (CANM), working with scientists as part of a program pairing artists with scientists in 6 different biomes as part of the celebration of the centennial of the national parks. This residency turned out to be all about learning how the Ancestral Puebloans disappearance was largely due to climate change - they deforested, overgrazed and overhunted the area and when resources became scarce society fell apart. Archeologists showed me the evidence - late Puebloan burials which were massacre sites, middens with mouse and chipmunk remains rather than deer and antelope from earlier more prosperous times. It was a sobering trip punctuated by enormous rainstorms which caused $2 billion of damage in Boulder and kept us out of the field on multiple occasions. I've written extensively about that experience on this blog and it led to multiple series of paintings and monotypes.

This May I went to Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory accompanying a group of climate scientists who study ice to find out about how the climate is changing over long periods of time. Karl Kreutz and Seth Campbell led the group and very generously allowed me to join them. Karl is a Professor who uses ice core chemistry to study the Earth's climate history primarily within the last 15000 years. Seth is a Research Assistant Professor who uses geophysics and modeling to study glacier systems in the Arctic and Antarctic. We were on the Eclipse Ice Field - the largest non-polar ice field on the planet where they and their team took ice cores to measure changes in CO2 levels over millennia and did ground penetrating radar to study the changes in the ice - they have worked on this site for many years.

Coming back around to that question of why go - the high latitudes are quite different than the parts of the world where most of us spend our time. And they are places that are endangered thanks to climate change. One example many are familiar with is the paucity of glaciers remaining at Glacier National Park. There is an emotional and a visual hit to going someplace dramatic, beautiful and endangered. I want to make artwork that resonates both intellectually and emotionally about a complicated scientific set of ideas – how better than to go to the places in question with the scientists studying them and bring that experience back into the studio?

From the photos in this post you can see that it's a stark and beautiful landscape. It was very cold, very quiet and very remote. Spending time there was challenging and inspiring and I am very grateful to Karl and Seth for letting me join them!

Coming up - posts about what the trip was like, what I learned and more including the week I spent at Kluane Lake Research Station after time at Eclipse. Also an article in the REI Newsletter in the near future. All photos in the post are mine and are of the Eclipse and its surrounds.