Six Hours is a series of multiple- and long-exposure photographs made while observing bodies of ice slowly change state. As they melt, surfaces collapse, colors migrate, boundaries shift, and temporary structures form and disappear. The camera records these changes not as a sequence of before-and-after images, but as landscapes continually remade by time.
 

Seen at close range, the ice becomes difficult to place in scale. A ridge can resemble a mountain range; a seam becomes a horizon; trapped particles suggest geological strata, vegetation, or distant terrain. Forms produced over the course of hours begin to resemble processes that ordinarily unfold across vastly longer spans of time.

I began the project while thinking about environmental change and the difficulty of perceiving transformations that exceed the scale of individual experience. The process of rapid glacier loss, for example, can be explained by a few chain reactions. One is the darkening of colors which makes the ice sheet attract more sunlight and melt at increasing rate. The other is the fact that as it melts, the elevation lowers, and lower elevations often comes with warmer temperatures.

Rather than attempting to illustrate climate change directly, I became interested in how a small and temporary material event could evoke much larger cycles of accumulation, erosion, instability, and disappearance.

The compositions are also informed by my interest in Japanese landscape painting, particularly its use of emptiness, shifting perspective, and reduced means to suggest immense spaces. In Six Hours, landscape is both real and imagined: something observed closely enough that an object loses its familiar scale and becomes a world of its own.