The Icehouse Architect (documentation)

This video documents a walkthrough of The Icehouse Architect, focusing on sculptural pieces where glass, video, and light interact. The work sits at the intersection of climate science and fantasy, using speculative futures and tactics of awe and wonder to disarm the overwhelm of ecological grief. Formal and material references to climate monitoring and interventions tether the project to the actionable present. In this space between future/present, myth/science, viewers are invited into quiet contemplation of loss, urgency, responsibility, and care.

The six works form a fragmented mythology of a world whose glaciers and icecaps have melted. They reference strategies for monitoring and mitigating ice loss alongside an imagined, embodied method of rebuilding ice post-melt. Glass objects, shaped after ice formations, refract light and video into shifting spectres, carrying the myth’s quiet magic into physical space. The work proposes new collective responses emerge from this tension.

Ice Spirits

These rock-and-glass sculptures draw inspiration from rock glaciers, where layers of stone insulate the ice within, as well as from the striking ice formations found on Lake Baikal in Siberia, the world’s oldest and deepest freshwater lake.

As part of The Icehouse Architect’s post-melt future mythology, rocks have been holding the spirit of the ice until a time when ice can thrive again. As the story centres around human characters, the Ice Spirits are one of the elements that give agency to non-human actors in the work.

We will all be architects of this Icehouse

This work is activated by the viewer's position in relation to the light source mounted on the surveyor's tripod (see video documentation). It recreates a scaled-down version of anchored seabed curtains, a climate intervention currently being researched to protect ocean-terminating glaciers from warming deep ocean water. The UHMW UD fabric, polymer flotation buoy and cement bases, reference current designs for the anchored curtains.

The text is coated in high-index reflective glass microbeads, referencing another climate intervention proposal using these materials to increase Arctic ice reflectivity. The words remain invisible until viewed from the same angle as the directed light source.

This piece bridges speculative future and actionable present, acknowledging large-scale climate interventions as both care and potential ecological risk while positioning viewers as active participants in collective agency.

The Collection (detail)

This detail shows the installation components of the 4-channel video The Collection. Four tablets are mounted to the wall in wooden boxes with french cleats. Four screens, made to mimic ice formations, hang in front of the tablets suspended by steel airline cable from brackets at the top of the walls. The irregular surfaces of the glass "ice screens" bend and distort the video underneath. Each screen was created by using a different technique manipulating hot glass.

Within the myth's narrative, this piece shows one stage of the ice rebuilding system: an individual swimming the waterways collecting heat in her body. She swims through the screens, back and forth. The videos are 4 minute loops.

Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins (2024)

Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins was commissioned by The National Arts Centre for the Kipnes Lantern, a hexagonal glass building, four of whose faces are composed of LED screens. Viewers never see the entire video surface; their perspective changes with their position on the street. This constraint became both a consideration and a tool for storytelling. Selected clips of the documentation are from different street positions and from various points throughout the narrative.

This work uses extremophiles (microbes able to thrive in extreme environments deemed inhospitable to humans) as a speculative lens to imagine resilience and responsiveness in a site of extreme abandonment. Called in by the scientists, the microbes investigate the landscape, awkward and hesitant at first, until their movements build a choreography that dislodges the abandonment molecules from the site. For the scientists, the microbes leave movement notations and the encouragement that they too can become dancers.

Part 4: The Trauma Surrogates (excerpt)
This three-minute excerpt is from the 22-minute experimental video No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom, a series of vignettes that tell the story of a tiny revolution of care for the earth. Creatures—real and imagined, human and more-than-human—share stories on a speculative radio show transmitting from under a toxic bloom. Each story, visualized by the host through costumed performances in the landscape, proposes a strategy for reorienting our relationships to resource extraction and the messes it leaves behind.

Part 4, The Trauma Surrogates, looks to fungi as models for metabolizing toxicity. Informed by the bioremediating capacities of mushrooms, it imagines a service group trained to translocate the trauma of others to their own interiors, where it can be worn out and rendered inert.

The armature for the suspended mushroom was built with wire wrapped in paper and cotton gauze, then painted with tempera and finished with gelatine. 

Transmission Notices (excerpts)
Transmission Notices are a series of four short interludes within No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom. The notices are placed throughout the video, punctuating the longer vignettes. They offer breathing room while extending the work’s speculative ecology.

Their brevity and recurrence create the rhythm of transmissions—signals surfacing from what are often considered marginal scales and minor beings. The texts link queer and ecological concerns: rejecting heroic individualism, recognizing states like disgust and overwhelm as forces to work with not surrendered to, and imagining an Anthology of Care that serializes collective stories.

By collapsing registers of scale and attention—tiny organisms, pop-cultural pedagogy, revolutionary dispatches—the Transmission Notices fold overlooked materialities into political imagination. They are a reminder that care and resistance often emerge from the small, the unexpected, and the easily passed over.

Part 1: Visceral Conversation Practices

Visualization exercise to connect to the toxicity of Faro Mine Complex

Part 2: Crypto-Kinetic Story Collective

An encounter with a member of a collective dedicated to keep important stories going. Their perspective on time and narrative figures objects as subjects and humans as potential plot lines the objects pass through.

PART 3: Perspective Switching Rituals

PART 5: Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins

Visualizations to Reclaim the Power of Shape-Shifting (excerpt)

Exercises for Being Close to You (excerpts)

Earthly Commitments to the Land and its Ghosts (2019)

Last Dance (2017)

Two discoed visitors travel to Grande Staircase-Escalente, a protected land monument in southern Utah, just before it was set to be considerably downsized by the Trump administration. They have come for one last dance before the metaphorical lights go on.

As they explore land formations, their movements refract onto the landscape and the landscape is reflected onto their bodies. Their costumes, prosthetic connection devices between human and place.

Audio track incorporates sounds collected on-site. Collab. with Lily Reeves.

Prototype: Bollards for Phoenix, Arizona (2016)

Phoenix is a city covered in cement and engineered for cars, not pedestrians. Bollards, designed to obstruct vehicles and shield pedestrians, became the model for these cement-cast video kaleidoscopes. Inside, animated images of bodies, dirt, rock, and bone refract into infinite repetition, defying the constraints of the cement that holds them. What is ordinarily defensive infrastructure turns expansive, opening a gesture of connection between the human body above and the earth sealed beneath the pavement.

This prototype is from a series of experiments with mirrors as connection devices with the land in the desert Southwest.