Working and walking on the ice, I pressed analogue film into the glacial surface to create an imprint. This work captures different aspects of the glacial surface at a moment in time and records weather, light, temperature, water volume, moisture, air pockets in the ice, frozen emulsion – a record of climate and atmospheric activity.
Longyearbyen Glacier is a small valley glacier 4.8km long, about 520 metres wide. It’s a cold-based glacier, frozen throughout its entire body. Old trimlines suggest that it was 20-30 metres thicker in some places around 1920.
This work becomes a cryospheric indexical print, an imprint, a trace, the residue of what once was, engaging the glacier as a collaborator in the making of the work. The work becomes a witness to cryospheric fragility and the thresholds of tipping dynamics.
In the context of planetary boundaries, this work comments on place-based planetary movements and in science education, references the phenomenology of climate.
Medium: Hand printed photographs from analogue negative, series #1-16, 2026
Size: 420cm x 594cm
Amanda Page 