Current Textures + Latest Works 🏳️

white-flag surrenders and blowing-in-the-wind prayers

Hi team,

You already know the glaciers are melting due to our human habits; scientists have been shouting about this aspect of climate change with ever-escalating urgency since before many of us were born. Dr. Mauri Pelto, Science Director of the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project, has measured and documented the retreat of the same glaciers every summer since 1984, and has conducted detailed field work on eight glaciers annually. My friend NCGCP Art Director Jill Pelto has been along on this journey for over half her life, and has created incredible imagery along the way.

This past August, I joined the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project team for ten days of their annual three-week field season to communicate melting via paint, thread, and scrap fabric. I already wrote to you about my experience here on Substack and on the website blog.

In just a three days, our climate art show Shaped by Ice: Glacial Identities opens. In some ways, it’s nine artists telling you what you already know—the glaciers are melting—but I hope it’s more than that. More showing than telling, you know? More counteraction and catalyzing.

We consume a lot in two dimensions: on screens, on paper. The measurements of glacier loss are staggering (the Easton glacier, for example, has retreated 620m since 1990 and over 100m in the last two years alone). The numbers feel flat to me, too, though, as a human who’s honestly moved more by beauty than data.

The work in this exhibition asks you to step into it. You can feel the melting landscape’s weight through each artist’s voice and hands. Each of us shares a contrasting perspective: Jill Pelto (painter and show curator), Julia Ditto (illustrator), Claire Giordano (painter), Jason Hummel (photographer), Shari Macy (photographer), Rose Mcadoo (dessert artist), Danielle Schlunegger-Warner (mixed-media artist), Cal Waichler (printmaker), and myself.

When I created my original five flags, I sat on or next to each glacier and listened to seracs calving and felt the ice-melt seeping through my raincoat seat. I painted with babbling glacial runoff and stitched layers of the melt-freeze cycle with white thread and then with blue thread when I looked closer and realized my tones were off. I stitched more on top of those stitches and patched and pivoted and inadvertently added a dusting of wind-blown dirt to each canvas.

I want you to feel the LAYERS of this. And then, too, I want you to feel the emptiness where the glaciers used to be. The flags are both white-flag surrenders to all the melting we cannot stop and blowing-in-the-wind prayers for us all to act in the ways we can.

At home here in Maine, as I set about creating bigger pieces to show in this gallery, that empty space felt heavier. The trickling meltwater running off the toe of each glacier has a weighty job of connecting ice to communities, human and non-human, downhill. As the glaciers recede, that water both lessens and has further to travel. The current has to make its way through the scooped-out landscape where the ice used to flow many meters thick.

It is tempting for me to continue explaining these three “impact flags”, but I trust you feel what I’m trying to say here—

and I hope you come see this work in person, because these photos flatten everything.

My goal in these pieces is to communicate both the glacial textures as they were in one moment of my witnessing (August, 2024) and the texture of negative space with a current running through it. Current: present and current: flowing.

These striking large (~32” x 36”) “impact flags” will be on my website along with the string of five painted-en-plein-air “original flags” the week of April 14 if they do not sell at the Shaped by Ice show opening weekend. If you know now that you’d like to collect one or all, please email me (emmamarymurraystudio@gmail) to get on the waitlist and I’ll notify you if they’re available for purchase. I can’t wait to see where they end up.

In the meantime, to keep these pieces accessible to all, I created a set of five postcards from the original flags. They’re printed on super-thick (32pt) unlined fancy paper, so they could be fine art prints, but I labelled them postcards to inspire you to send them to your friends, lovers, and lawmakers. Science communication meets aesthetic snail mail!

Also, upcoming:

🌀 APRIL 11, Seattle, WA — Shaped By Ice climate art show is opening.

🌀 APRIL 12, Seattle, WA — Landscape Embroidery Workshop at Slip Gallery (just a couple spots left!).

🌀 APRIL 13, Seattle, WA — Protect Our Winters Panel Event at the Shaped By Ice show.

🌀 MAY 12 + MAY 19, Mount Desert, ME — Special two-day Landscape Embroidery Workshop at Artwaves.

I feel so lucky to do this work. Thanks for being in it with me.

<3,

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^ Lower Curtis with fellow Shaped by Ice artists Cal Waichler and Jill Pelto.