Walking in Antarctica consists of photographs, sculptures from 3D scans of geological formations, and a first-person audio tour, resulting from a seven-week residency in Antarctica in 2015 through the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

Sculptures based on photographs I took in Antarctica as a grantee of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artist and Writers Program allow viewers to experience these geological forms in three-dimensional space, not limited by the fixed perspective of a photograph. I spent a total of seven weeks at the end of 2015 at the U.S. Antarctic Program's McMurdo Station and at scientific field camps. I have developed an innovative method of producing sculpture true to the complexity of the natural world by employing photogrammetry, a process by which a series of still photos of a scene (or "captures") can be assembled by software into a three-dimensional scan of a scene. The scans become the basis for sculptures made with digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printing or CNC (computer-controlled) routers, a machine that can carve a 3D file in a variety of materials. On the router I typically use high-density urethane foam for its ability to hold detail yet be easily carved later with hand tools. The scan produced by the photogrammetric software is by no means ready for production. A variety of artistic decisions must be made, and small areas of the form that the software could not resolve have to be filled in using 3D modeling software, a painstaking process because the files are extremely complex — each scan consists of some 2 million tiny triangular facets. Once the piece has been carved or printed in sections and glued together, I refine the piece by hand and paint it. If I had the funding, I could produce them in higher-quality materials such as cast stone or metal.

Walking in Antarctica consists of photographs, sculptures from 3D scans of geological formations, and a first-person audio tour, resulting from a seven-week residency in Antarctica in 2015 through the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

The Erebus ice tongue is the end of a glacier that extends onto the sea ice on McMurdo Sound. A small opening in the tongue leads to an ice cave containing unusual and fragile ice crystal structures. It is accessible only a few weeks a year, in the company of a trained mountaineer from the US Antarctic Program, and I was extremely fortunate to visit it twice during my residency in late November and on December 1, 2015, first with a group and then with only myself the mountaineer. Shortly after that, the cave was closed for the season. 

The crystals are lit by a lamp we brought inside. You enter the first chamber by sliding through a small opening and down a slight incline on your stomach. Some light filters in through the entrance. Further inside it is pitch black. I found that bouncing lights off the walls or backlighting the features brought them to life in a way that flash photography did not, so I directed the mountaineer to aim the light in different places as I took photographs.

Some of these photos were featured in an article on the Erebus Glacier ice tongue cave on the adventure travel web site AtlasObscura.com in early 2016. Two of them have also been enlarged to 7 x 10 feet and will be installed as part of a series of exhibitions by Maryland artists at BWI Marshall International Airport between June 2017 and June 2018. One was installed in a year-long outdoor exhibition of international artists at the Palacio de las Aguas, Buenos Aires, Argentina, that opened in 2023.

The sea ice pressure ridges were on different sections of McMurdo Sound. One was near New Harbor, accessed by a one-hour snowmobile ride from the biology dive camp where I spent a few days in the field. The other pressure ridge I photographed was at Scott Base, operated by the New Zealand Antarctic Program. Three months later, the Scott Base pressure ridges collapsed into the ocean and floated out to sea.

Walking in Antarctica consists of photographs, sculptures from 3D scans of geological formations, and a first-person audio tour, resulting from a seven-week residency in Antarctica in 2015 through the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

Photographs of the unusual ice formations found in freshwater Antarctic lakes, which are fed by glaciers. These photographs were taken at Cape Royds and at Lake Hoare in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Both areas are only visited by science teams and personnel supporting them. The Dry Valleys is a fragile environment and requires special permission to visit. I spent a week there, including five days at Lake Hoare, as a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. My project was to photograph ice and geological formations in order to produce both archival pigment prints and three-dimensional artworks.

Walking in Antarctica consists of photographs, sculptures from 3D scans of geological formations, and a first-person audio tour, resulting from a seven-week residency in Antarctica in 2015 through the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

On Dec. 16th, 2015, with a mountaineer guide, I visited Blood Falls, a glacier stained with unique iron formations. The following day, the guide and I hiked up some steep gravel inclines in the McMurdo Dry Valleys above Lake Bonney to elevated ridges and plateaus to see the ventifacts. These are large granite boulders that have been pummeled by fierce winds picking up grains of gravel — imagine a giant sandblaster over millennia. It was a steady climb for well over an hour and then we came over a ridge where the ground was strewn with huge granite boulders curved, hollowed and pierced into strange shapes. I felt like I’d entered the world’s largest Surrealist sculpture garden. I circled the formations shown here with the eventual intention of creating 3D files from still photos via photogrammetry (see the Antarctica in 3D section for general information about the process).

The Dry Valleys are the largest relatively ice-free region in Antarctica, encompassing a cold and windy desert ecosystem with lakes that have a permanently frozen cover of about 4 meters of ice and rare life forms (mostly microorganisms) that have adapted to the extreme conditions — these are active for only two to three months a year and otherwise lie dormant. By international treaty, they are an Antarctic Specially Managed Area. Other than the small number of scientists and science support personnel who do research in the Dry Valleys during the austral summer, very few people have even seen the ventifact fields. Even fewer have been allowed to visit Blood Falls, which is an Antarctic Specially Protected Area and requires an additional permit be issued in advance from a national Antarctic program.

I am currently working on a photo book project exploring the remote Arctic town of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, a former indigenous hunting ground that has been reshaped by its highly unusual geopolitical history and the impact of climate change. Part of the project focuses on the vestiges of the American Sondrestrom Air Base (1941-1992) that dominate the town's landscape. The exhibit I am currently planning with the Kangerlussuaq Museum and my planned photo book will include comparisons between vintage photos of the base in the collections of the Danish Arctic Institute and US National Archives, from research I have done. Examples of those are shown here. 

This isolated town of 500 people at the end of a 118-mile-long fjord was founded as a US air base that operated 1941-92. Repurposed and abandoned buildings and obsolete machinery remain, as do thousands of musk oxen descended from 27 imported as a scientific experiment in 1962. In 1999, German automakers built a road to the ice cap covering 80% of Greenland for a short-lived failed project to test drive cars on ice. The effects of climate change are starkly visible at the road's end, formerly the ice cap edge, now a long gravel slope uncovered by melting ice. The book will explore the past 80 years of the impact of human interventions in the environment: military, corporate, scientific, and global climate change. Compelling visual images bring home the seriousness of the climate change problem and the urgency of confronting it now. My project also illuminates a little-known corner of American and European history related to their presence in the region and its lasting impact, as Greenlanders aspires to a postcolonial future independent of Denmark. This story intersects with environmental, political, and cultural identity issues that resonate with the experiences of other indigenous and colonized populations around the world — including within the US.

I am currently working on a photo book project exploring the remote Arctic town of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, a former indigenous hunting ground that has been reshaped by its highly unusual geopolitical history and the impact of climate change. I collaborated with the Kangerlussuaq Museum, which received funding from the US Embassy in Copenhagen to redo two rooms with a permanent exhibit of my photographs and one sculpture. One room follows "The Journey of Ice" showing places along the approximately 20-mile river fed by the melting ice cap to the site of the town at mouth of the fjord. The 10 photos shown here focus on the ice cap and glaciers that flow off of it. They include a vintage photograph from the 1950s of one of the sites, the Russell Glacier, which shows the effects of climate change when compared to my photos at that site.

The isolated town of 500 people at the end of a 118-mile-long fjord was founded as a US air base that operated 1941-92. In 1999, German automakers built a road to the ice cap covering 80% of Greenland for a short-lived failed project to test drive cars on ice. The effects of climate change are starkly visible at the road's end, formerly the ice cap edge, now a long gravel slope uncovered by melting ice. The book will explore the past 80 years of the impact of human interventions in the environment: military, corporate, scientific, and global climate change. Compelling visual images bring home the seriousness of the climate change problem and the urgency of confronting it now.

I am currently working on a photo book project exploring the remote Arctic town of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, a former indigenous hunting ground that has been reshaped by its highly unusual geopolitical history and the impact of climate change. I collaborated with the Kangerlussuaq Museum, which received funding from the US Embassy in Copenhagen to redo two rooms with a permanent exhibit of my photographs and one sculpture. One room follows "The Journey of Ice" showing places along the approximately 20-mile river fed by the melting ice cap to the site of the town at mouth of the fjord. The 10 photos shown here focus on the ice cap and glaciers that flow off of it. They include a comparison between two photographs I a section of the ice cap that locals call the "Reindeer Glacier" that shows considerable ice loss between 2018 and 2022. I took the 2018 photo on my initial visit to Kangerlussuaq, a one-day stop on a tour of West Greenland, which is how I came to know about it and see it as the subject for a potential long-term project in the first place.

The isolated town of 500 people at the end of a 118-mile-long fjord was founded as a US air base that operated 1941-92. In 1999, German automakers built a road to the ice cap covering 80% of Greenland for a short-lived failed project to test drive cars on ice. The effects of climate change are starkly visible at the road's end, formerly the ice cap edge, now a long gravel slope uncovered by melting ice. The book will explore the past 80 years of the impact of human interventions in the environment: military, corporate, scientific, and global climate change. Compelling visual images bring home the seriousness of the climate change problem and the urgency of confronting it now.