During this last mapping session, I logged nearly 300 stones, which was a surprise to me because the area covered in this last session represents less than 20% of the overall area of the quarry. This density, the patterns of distribution based on relative sizes, and the location of these caches of glacial stone have given me something to think about, and I'm beginning to run analysis algorithms on the data in my geographic information system database to see if I can make a definitive claim about the stones. 

One thing I’ve learned that I wish I knew going into this project is that some of the spatial tools I’m trying to use need some specific additional data, so I’ll be collecting that additional data in the months to come. Initially, I was only interested in the metamorphic and igneous glacial stones (granites, quartzites, diorites, et cetera), but I came across several sedimentary stones that also showed evidence of glacial transportation (limestones in particular), so I recorded those as well.

I made a decision to not record any of the local limestone rocks because that was outside of the scope of what I was looking for, and this proved to be a mistake. Part of my initial hypothesis was that the glacial stones were discarded during quarrying operations. Halfway through the data collection (and after my comparative study of another regional quarry operated by the same workers during the same time period) it became clear that my hypothesis was probably wrong, it was most likely that the granite was being sorted and cached for collection.

In order to test this, one of the things I need to do now is look at the different spatial join matches that exist between the glacial stones and the rows of limestone piles throughout the quarry. The locations of glacial stones is a kind of point data, and I’ve been able to import that into my GIS as a feature class, but the rows of limestone piles are line data, and I don’t have that data recorded. Initially I was planning to use the satellite imagery as an overlay and trace the rows, but I’m having trouble getting the granularity of data that I want from the base map imagery and so I’m now going to grab that data by walking the piles in the field and tracking waypoints with my GPS so that I can import the data and populate the map with a feature class that has been ground-truthed.

There was one stone that I found in the quarry during a scouting trip that I was unable to locate during my actual survey. It was a dark green granitic stone that had been fractured into a couple dozen shards. I have a photo of the stone from the scouting trip, but for whatever reason, I did not come across it again and it is a mystery to me. I'm going to look for it again in the spring. 

I found a fragment of a different stone that I made a note of during my survey, and then several hours later in another part of the quarry I found the stone that this fragment came from. I confirmed this by retrieving the fragment and fitting it in place to the parent stone, and then I returned the fragment to the location where I originally found it. This incident confirmed for me the scale of human movement of these igneous stones within the limestone quarry. 

Another stone that I keep track of was moved a significant distance this summer by visitors to the quarry who had built a spiral cairn of limestone and put the granite boulder at the center of the gyre. They moved this stone 120 feet from where I had last seen it, and the stone weighs about 250 pounds, so moving it was a difficult task for whoever built the cairn. I was able to move it back to the recorded location, and I look forward to seeing if it moves again.

Most of you know about my project This Stone Wants To Go Home, in which I am mounting an expedition to return a granite boulder to the remnant of the glacier that originally moved it during the last ice age. I've been thinking about these human movements of stone in the quarry during my last few trips to the island, considering how my act of moving a boulder fits into this context as a similar sort of human action. These quarry-sorting and removal operations and my attempt to reunite a boulder to the landscape where it originated are both examples of the human movement of stone, and they are both examples of human activity defying the geologic. I'm hoping mine is more poetic since I'm actually engaging the source glacier and doing the work to recognize the marks and traces this glacier made in the deep past. My project is a dialogue with deep time where I'm asking the glacier to move the same stone again during the next ice age (if it ever comes).

I mention this expedition because while I was building the map of the quarry and entering the locations of these 542 glacial stones in my database, I couldn't help but imagine what will happen to these geologically classified "hard-rock" stones during the next glaciation, when they are picked up and pushed across the soft sedimentary limestone landscape again. 

Kelleys Island is known for a series of glacial grooves that were formed by these very stones that are scattered across the island, and historic photos of the island show that many of these quarried areas actually had massive glacial grooves carved in the limestone that was quarried away for gravel and building materials. 

These stones that shaped this landscape might get a chance to do it again in the next ice age, and so I'm working on simulations of the data to specify what a future landscape of the quarry might look like after the next glaciation. The size of the stones, the hardness of the stones with respect to the hardness of the bedrock, their location, and sequenced distribution all make it possible to speculate about how these stones will become cutting tools for a future glacier in the deep deep future. This is in line with a couple of earlier projects of mine (Implements For Future Glacial Scouring, 2015; and Lines Of Descent, 2019) where I modeled landscapes and formulated a design language for priming landscapes for future collaboration with geologic forces of the next ice age.

I'm hoping to talk more about this with you later this year as I turn my attention in my field work away from the quarry so that I can look more closely at the glacial morphology of the island and the various glacial grooves that remain across the island. I'll be sharing some of the ways my studio practice has been impacted by what I've learned so far from these grooves and I may share some process videos on my website as I further develop a body of work that has emerged during this project. I feel like I need to get a little further along before I share this online though.

Ferry service is spotty in the winter months and will at some point shut down for the season, so I'll need to charter a plane for some of my winter trips which I'm very excited about because I'll be able to take some aerial photographs of the areas where I've been working. I'm hopeful that I'll also be able to see the glacial grooves covered in snow, which is something I've never been able to see before. I might not be able to land on the island every month during the winter, but it is my intent to get as close as I can. I’m still sending postcards to my archive at the Nevada Museum of Art and to my subscribers, and when I can’t land on the island, I’ll send those from post offices along the western basin of Lake Erie.

Speaking of my postcards, I’ve printed another boxed edition of commemorative photos and I’ll be releasing those on my site sometime before March. It’s an edition of 18, which includes a set for my archive, and two artists proofs, so in reality there will only be 15 available for purchase. I’ll be announcing those boxed sets through my newsletter, so please be sure to subscribe.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support. Happy New Year.

RYAN DEWEY

I knew that I wouldn’t have the time to map out the location of granite boulders with GPS, so instead I took a brisk walk and kept a tally of the granite I came across in the span of an hour and a half: a total of 282 glacial stones. The walk was disorienting because the terrain was very familiar in features and characteristics. It was definitely a different location, but there was something very familiar about the landscape.

Like the quarry on Kelleys Island, Rockport was a limestone quarry. Kelleys Island is a Columbus Limestone member, whereas Rockport is Huron member, but they are definitely both Devonian-age, although between the two, Rockport seems to be the prime fossil bed. It was actually difficult to find pieces of limestone without fossils.

I had studied the map a little before I walked, so I had a sense of the lay of the land, but it looked a lot like the quarry I know in Ohio. Even the ground looked familiar with biotic soils, terrestrial algae, seasonal ponds, similar vegetation, remnants of rails, crushed cinders, coal, and slag. I limited my walk to an area the size of the Kelleys Island quarry so that I could get a sense of the comparative densities of granite boulders in the two quarries. The landscape was legible to me, and I started to recognize some of the decision-making strategies that I have seen on Kelleys.

Most of the granite and other igneous & metamorphic glacially transported stones I found were between pebble and cobble size, but I did find several very large boulders. Like Kelleys Island, most of the granite I found was collected into rows along with broken limestone, and was staged for removal via railcar.

The granite on Kelleys was evenly distributed throughout the quarry, but workers at Rockport seemed to have concentrated the granite into denser piles. In fact, during the first 60 minutes of the walk, I only found about 100 stones in Rockport, but the last 30 minutes as I was walking toward the mouth of the quarry that opened to the road that led to the loading docks, I found 150-170 stones from large cobble to small boulder size. The density of the granite suggested that they were concentrating it and possibly sorting it as the railcars headed to the docks.

I walked out by the docks and noticed that the channels were very deep so that the freighters could dock and have enough depth to draw as they were loaded with limestone. The water was very clean and bright. I noticed several boulders on the beach and even submerged in some of the water around the docks, and I don’t know if those were dropped by the glacier, or if they were moved to the water’s edge by quarry workers. However, the road between the docks and the quarry had 193 granite erratics, each the size of a small cow, and those stones were definitely placed there by the Department of Natural Resources, or whatever agency conserves the land.

And then I came across something that made sense to me; a heritage sign telling the story of the quarry:

“In 1914, the Great Lakes Lime and Stone Company opened ‘one of the largest and most complete’ stone quarries of its kind. A massive, half-mile-long conveyor belt stood hundreds of feet above the jetty that brought stone to the loading chutes that were lowered into the cargo holds of the biggest ships sailing the lakes. Huron limestone from Rockport and then Stoneport was shipped across the Great Lakes for use in building and road construction. Later, it filled the caissons under the Mackinac Bridge. Responding to transportation costs and a dminishing local supply of high-quality stone, the company moved its operations to Marblehead, Ohio, in 1948.”

I get on the ferry to go to Kelleys Island at Marblehead, and while some of the quarries on Kelleys are older than 1948, it’s possible that some of the areas I’m working in were previously quarried by this same company. I need to look into it more before I make any assertions about this, but it has provisionally confirmed for me that the similarities in the visual landscapes and the legibility of the decisions made by the quarry workers in both landscapes put these two places into relation with each other.

- RYAN DEWEY

I started sending out a postcard to my archive at the Nevada Museum of Art, and a duplicate copy to my personal studio archive each time that I set foot on Kelleys Island. It functions as a timecard, but it’s also a kind of handwritten personalized artist-book that logs the activities I undertake while aiming to communicate something about the geologic history that I’m investigating. It takes about four hours for me to write the entire set of postcards, get them stamped, and hand them to the post office clerk to be hand-canceled with the Kelleys Island post office label. Here’s a photo of me writing postcards onsite in the quarry:

Here’s an image of the postcards I’m sending out to my subscribers:

QSL CARDS & DX-PEDITIONS

I began to be interested in sending postcards logging my activities when I came across a special type of postcard called a QSL card. QSL cards come from amateur radio operators who send them to each other to confirm radio contact with a particular operator. These types of cards are collected as a record of radio contact and show the extent of one amateur radio operator’s communications across the planet (and even to the International Space Station). The name QSL comes from a type of radio code used to communicate longer messages with shortened Q-codes, and QSL is the spoken code phrase meaning “I confirm receipt of your transmission.” So a QSL card is just a written acknowledgement of having a successful QSL between two radio stations. They’re fascinating and radio operators have personalized cards made for their stations that they send out after contact.

There is a special category of QSL cards that is even more relevant to my work, and that’s a “DX-pedition card.” This Kingman Reef Dxpedition card from 1980 is the card that drew me into this world of postcard reporting:

Wikipedia defines a DX-pedition like this:

“A DX-pedition is an expedition to what is considered an exotic place by amateur radio operators and DX listeners, perhaps because of its remoteness, access restrictions or simply because there are very few radio amateurs active from that place.”

And so a DX-pedition card is one that outlines the details of the expedition, the particulars of the activities and reports the connection of a radio transmission at a time and place with the operator’s station code and the radio frequency used to transmit.

Here’s an image of the reverse side of the QSL card:

The reverse side of the card has several types of information: a printed itinerary of the major events that transpired during the DX-pedition, a narrative, and a form-field with spaces to indicate particular dynamic details of the transmission. This QSL card is not a mailable postcard, because the layout doesn’t meet international postal requirements for postcards like the need for an address area and indica for postage. It’s also smaller than a mailable postcard. This type of card would have been sent in an envelope to the recipients of the transmission.

When a DX-pedition is being planned, it’s announced on a bulletin board and listserv to radio operators who will then book a time slot with the transmitting DX station. This way there is a record of who will be tuning in and how to contact them to send them the QSL card. In the case of this Kingman Reef DX-pedition, 5,500 QSO’s were made from Kingman Reef on January 11, 1980 by a team of operators. This card was filled out by radio operator AA8Z for the transmission they made at 16:43 GMT.

POLAR EXPEDITION CACHET ENVELOPES & POSTAGE

Another type of printed expedition mail pieces that I studied in my design phase was the cachet envelope. It’s a type of envelope with a printed image on the left side of the front of the envelope, and includes a destination address area and a stamp at minimum. Some cards include other details on the fronts like stamped information that takes place during the expedition that could not have been known ahead of time to be printed on the envelope.

Here is an example from my collection of polar expedition envelopes:

Often expeditions and permanent research stations will have a supply of these pre-stamped envelopes, and collectors can request the research station to send an envelope, although there are significant guidelines around sending “covers” or stamped envelopes. For instance, the National Science Foundation’s United States Antarctic Program Participant Guide offers the following information on how to handle requests for mail:

“Philatelists (stamp collectors) are interested in receiving mail from Antarctica, and the NSF has a procedure to support philately at a level not to interfere with the science mission…While in Antarctica, you may receive unsolicited philatelic mail from collectors. The Foundation discourages this unauthorized philatelic activity, and you will be entirely within your rights in declining to respond to such unsolicited requests. Please discard the material in the appropriate recycling container…Philatelists may obtain a maximum of two covers (self-addressed stamped envelopes) a year by writing to the postal clerks (addresses below) at the three year-round U.S. Antarctic stations. No more than two covers per person per station per year. Covers will be processed for personal (that is, noncommercial) use of individuals only…” (p60, NSF: 2016)

But historically, these types of correspondence provided important public relations communications for expeditions and gave the public a sense of connection to the expeditions. This is one of the reasons I’m borrowing from this postal tradition in my projects on Kelleys Island with FIELD OFFICE and the Baffin Island expedition. Here are a couple of other covers and cachet envelops from multi-national expeditions that I brought into my collection during this research phase:

I was drawn to the left printed side of the envelope (above) that featured a map of Antarctica and the color blocks in crisp printing. I also liked the way the six flags were represented on the cover.

This cover (above) has interesting inked stamp seals on the cover that I may think about adding to my correspondence field desk set, and there is this interesting dot pattern included on the bottom left corner of the envelope which was designed for producing a uniform six-digit number. The reverse of the envelope (below) shows a key to how each number should be notated in the dot pattern, and I included it below because it provides a way to customize an envelope in ways that I haven’t seen on other envelope covers.

I found a lot of covers from Antarctica, but my expedition is headed north, so I started looking for a cover that was more representational of the area I will be in when I take a granite glacial erratic 2,243 miles north to reach the remnant ice cap of the glacier that first moved my stone. I found this cover from Baffin Island and knew I had to have it in my collection. I like the line drawing of the island on this cover (below):

FIELD OFFICE POSTCARDS & STAMPS

The postcards I am sending from FIELD OFFICE to the people who subscribed were formatted with QSL cards in mind. Here is the backside of the first version of the postcard before I had to redesign them:

When I received this card in my studio mailbox, I was surprised to see that the cancel was made by machine instead of by hand, and that it was not made on Kelleys Island. On my next trip to the island I talked with the postal clerk who was helpful in understanding some of the issues with the mail routing. We decided I would hand them to her during post office hours instead of placing them in the curbside mailbox, which means I now have to ensure I write my cards before the post office closes for the weekend, and so since I mail them before my trip is over, the cards don’t include details of my activities completed on the weekend. But they’re hand canceled which is what I wanted so that the archive shows the timecard was sent from Kelleys Island.

I’ve gone through two designs now for this postcard, the first design was completely scrapped after a month-long attempt at correspondence with an artist who had previously obtained rights for some of the language I unwittingly used on the card. I redesigned the card, had them reprinted, and began sending them out to subscribers in May. The redesign gave me a chance to adjust where I placed the form fields on the card which were obstructed by some of the machine cancel on the first set of cards. Here is what it looks like in the current iteration:

Here is what the newly designed card looks like when filled out:

I have not yet designed a cachet cover/envelope, but I intend to produce one both for FIELD OFFICE and the Baffin Island expedition.

There is so much to write about that is related to stamps, mail, and print communications, but I’ll save that for another day. Thanks for reading through to the end, I know it was a long post.

To be continued…

- RYAN DEWEY

Over the years I’ve found it puzzling that there are so many glacial erratics in the abandoned limestone quarries on Kelleys Island. Many of these erratics are granite, but tillite, quartzite, diorite, gabbro, gneiss are also found, among others. If you knew nothing about rocks, these erratics would stand out to you because the colors of these stones contrast with the consistent gray of the limestone bedrock in the quarry. The pink stone in the image above is an erratic, the gray stones filling the foreground are pieces of local limestone broken up during quarrying. The color contrast is an immediate clue. What puzzles me is why these stones were not removed during quarrying operations.

I’m attempting to highlight how the glacial geography of the region created the right conditions for logging, vineyards, and quarrying during the late 1800s to bring the island ecology to its current fragile state, and to think about what that means for the future of the island and the biodiversity in the Lake Erie basin.

Earlier this year I took a scouting trip to Kelleys Island to plan my activities for the next year. I visited a number of sites where I planned to return to map and catalog different elements of the landscape. To get a sense of the distribution and concentration of erratics on the island, I brought along a tally click counter and walked through the different quarries, clicking to count stones that were clearly out of place.

Because I’ve spent so much time in the East Quarry, I knew I’d find hundreds of erratics, and on a brisk hike I counted 249 in just one small section of that quarry. But I did not expect what I found in the 59-acre Huntley-Beatty preserve (located south-west and closer to town); in two hours I had only counted seven erratics in that quarry.

I started forming hypotheses that I would begin testing out over the next several months, and I went home, prepared my data notebooks, and set out to start mapping on my next trip.

After 3 days of mapping, collecting the GPS coordinates of the erratics, and making notes about the roundedness, size, color, texture, and type of stone, I’ve completed 30% of the quarry and logged 150 erratics.

At this point it might be useful to explain why this matters to me. Over the last two years as I’ve been trying to pinpoint the Canadian Shield source outcrop for the 38lb granite glacial erratic I found in Ohio as part of my expedition project This Stone Wants To Go Home, I’ve talked to geologists in three countries about ice flow directionality and the movement of erratics. More than half of these geologists have told me that it’s not interesting to trace the movement of a glacially displaced stone. As a trained scientist, I hear what they are saying: the discipline of geology is asking different questions now. But I’m not doing geology; I’m doing poetry.

What’s more is that I am looking at glacial erratics that have been moved by people after they had been moved by glaciers, so it’s more about human land use than it is about geology, and as a trained anthropologist I’m reading the traces to see if I can determine the decision-making strategies used daily in the historic limestone quarry operations on Kelleys Island regarding what to do with the hundreds of granite glacial erratics encountered in the process of extracting limestone from the landscape. Why were these erratics left behind? Why didn’t the quarry harvest these foreign stones?

I had a hunch about why these stones were ignored, and so I began to gather my data on this most recent trip to the island. Starting at the western-most edge of the quarry, I worked my way east conducting a box search, a classic search and rescue technique that moves in parallel lines back and forth incrementally moving across an area while progressing in one direction.

The erratics I found were interesting.

Here (above) is an example of stones moved by people after the quarrying operations had shut down. These igneous rocks were laid out in a circular pattern near the north-western edge of the quarry. I’m less interested in rocks that have been moved in contemporary times and instead more interested in rocks that were moved when the quarry was operational. So while I included these rocks in my inventory, I’m not factoring them into the pattern matching for looking at the distribution of stones in linear patterns.

This wheelbarrow has been in this quarry for at least the 15 years that I’ve visited the island (if not longer), and I’ve noticed it move from time-to-time. Initially I came across it during hunting season and I assumed it belonged to a hunter who would use it to move deer out of the quarry. Now I’m wondering if maybe it’s being used to move stone and aggregates around during the construction of walking and bike paths through the quarry.

For as long as I can remember, there has been a pile of rusty metal objects in the quarry which I presume to be artifacts of the quarrying operations. I always liked looking at this pile because so many of the objects are still recognizable. I’ve taken several photos of this pile over the years, and in April I took this photograph:

When I came back three weeks later, I was startled to see the entire pile had been cleared away. Perhaps the wheelbarrow had something to do with this removal operation.

I continued mapping and photographing erratics.

I’ve apparently never been to the quarry in May, because I had no idea how many lakeside daisies grew in the quarry. The bloom season is short, and seeing the landscape dotted with these yellow flowers proved to be a beautiful, but disorienting, experience. The lakeside daisy (Hymenoxys herbacea) grows in landscapes that most plants find inhospitable, so there is little competition between the daisy and other plants.

It rained during the second day of mapping and I was able to take photos of some of the rocks before and after the rain. I was curious to see if the contrast would be as stark across wet and dry conditions. Here are two photo of the same stone taken less than 24 hours apart:

Features other than color also help to distinguish between quarried remnants and glacial erratics: roundedness of the rock, textures of the rock, patterning, size—but features can be deceiving, as in the case of weathered limestone that looks like an erratic but is not. Several times during this initial quick mapping I mistakenly started logging data about a stone that ended up being a piece of local limestone that had been weathered and rounded over the years. These imposter erratics fooled me, but as I worked to describe each of the rocks it became clear that I was wrong about the rock. Here’s a rounded limestone followed by a rounded tillite:

Knowing some history about the Kelley brothers and their approach to business, I have some thoughts about why the erratics were left behind. This doesn’t solve the mystery of why there is an abundance of erratics in the East Quarry vis-a-vis the absence of erratics in the Huntley-Beatty preserve quarry. In early June I took another trip to the island to continue mapping and to visit some of the other preserves in the area, and I met up with a local resident who was helping me ethically source some limestone from quarries that are not active preserves. I mentioned my hypothesis about the absence of erratics in Huntley-Beatty, that it’s surrounded by houses which possibly made it easier to pilfer erratics, compared to East Quarry which is surrounded by forests and parkland. He mentioned that another factor I should consider is the timelines of operations for the two quarries. Huntley-Beatty was much more recent in history compared to the East Quarry, and possibly details of the quarry operations may have become more efficient, and also possibly the granite erratics were now seen to have economic value, whereas the East Quarry was primarily focused on materials for lime kilns and raw material for flux in the steel mills. Either way, in East Quarry, the granite was not the objective. There is more to explore here, but I need to do some reading first.

In his book Geology In The Field, Robert Compton gives this advice about geologic mapping:

“Mapping is likely to be exploratory and deliberate until the principal rocks have become familiar and mapping units have been tested and proven. Visits to nearby mapped areas and to type sections of formations may need to complete this selection. When mapping becomes more rapid and systematic, it should be directed toward parts of the area that seem most likely to resolve the project’s major questions. As parts of the area are more or less completed, they can be checked by constructing cross sections through them. Recesses may be needed to do laboratory work on critical fossils or rocks.” (p7, Compton: 2016).

I’ve been concentrating my efforts now on the stones that were moved by quarry workers (and not contemporary land users), and I have typically found the erratics near the edges of the linear lines of operations running west to east in the quarry, so I’ve concentrated my search efforts to those runs of limestone piles where I find the erratics. Occasionally I’ll see an erratic that is situated between these limestone rows, but it seems that these row are more likely to help me resolve my questions, so I am going to try to move a little quicker through the remaining portions of the quarry.

…to be continued.

- RYAN DEWEY

The understory is green and full, but the canopy has not shown up yet. When I climbed down into the quarry I was surprised to see the quarry floor in bloom with the lakeside daisy (Hymenoxys herbacea), which I had never seen in bloom. This species of daisy thrives in landscapes where other plants cannot grow, so the barren landscape of an empty quarry is perfect for this plant.

On day one it looked like it would rain, and I saw evidence of rain everywhere in the seasonal ponds scattered around the quarry floor.

It rained the second day of my trip, but there is no bad weather, so I went out to see what I could see in the rain. The seasonal ponds clearly form during these rainstorms and the limestone pavement keeps the water from draining away. Several areas of the quarry were inaccessible during this trip because of the water. I walked through several puddles that were deep enough to come up to my ankles.

The floor of the quarry is very much alive, covered in mosses…

and cryptobiotic/biological soil crusts…

Biological soil crusts are extremely fragile, and extremely important to the biodiversity of the quarry, and the carbon and nitrogen cycles in the quarry. Stepping on them can destroy what takes years to grow. They rely on the seasonal ponds for expansion and activation, where algae and cyanobacteria species like Nostoc form the crusts that end up spreading in clumps to build up the soil communities.

The seasonal ponds bring to life colonies of algae, spike rush, and Eurasian watermilfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum) in a freshwater tidepool/rockpool of sorts…

There are vascular plants in the quarry (other than the cedar) that I’ve not seen here before, such as this fruit sapling that I think might be some kind of cherry:

I spent the bulk of this May trip mapping erratics in the quarry which I’ll write about in my next post. I’m interested in how historic quarry operations decided to handle the granite glacial boulders in a process where they were quarrying limestone, and I’m mapping the project in ArcGIS to identify patterns of placement to see what I can determine about life in the quarry in the mid-1800s.

to be continued…

- RYAN DEWEY

One of the ways I commemorate my field projects is through a postcard that functions as my timecard for clocking in and out while also logging the details of my activities each time I am on Kelleys Island. These cards are mailed from Kelleys Island in duplicate to the archive for my project which is housed at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, and to my studio on the mainland for my record.

These handwritten postcards track the developments of my project in real time, complete with regional postmarks from the island and the surrounding area. Today, I'm announcing that I will be using these cards to share personal messages about the details of my work on Kelleys Island, sent direct to your mailbox, too.

Think of this like an artist book, dispatched in 24 installments, telling the story as it is unfolding, written to you, personally. It's difficult to put postcards on a bookshelf, so I'll also send you a custom printed box to store these postcards on your bookshelf. I've already received a sample of the first draft of the box, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. The linen finish feels so nice. I just need to make a few revisions to the graphics on the bottom of the box, and I'll send them to print.

More than ever, I need people who are invested in my practice to make it sustainable, and to make the work possible.

Supporting my practice makes it real for you and for me. By purchasing this artist book, you're also making my field practice possible. You're making it possible for me to closely observe, engage and interpret the glacial landscapes on Kelleys Island, and you're enabling me to spend enough time to produce work responsively as I better understand the place.

I’m thrilled to be able to share these stories with you as they unfold on the island and in my studio, and I am grateful for your support. Let me thank you for your sponsorship with this artist book collection of postcards.

Click below to learn more:

Thank you for your continued support. 

RYAN DEWEY

I spent most of my 20s in hot places: Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, Nigeria—which was fine with me because I hated winter. And then one December I moved back to Cleveland, Ohio. A year later I was shoveling my way out of waist-high snow drifts and trying to come to terms with being cold. The next year a snowplow knocked me over with a punch of salty, slushy snow. I was truly miserable.

Then one day I came across this early Rockwell Kent painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art and I realized Kent saw something in winter that I didn’t. So I spent an obsessive number of hours closely viewing this painting, counting the hundreds of different blues and whites Kent mixed in 1907 to express this scene of the coast of Maine and my attitude began to thaw.

But it wasn’t until I had a transformational first encounter with the landscapes carved by the Laurentian Ice Sheet on Kelleys Island in Lake Erie that I started to shift my attention away from the equator and toward my longing for ice.

Which brings me to this odd moment in my practice where I’m planning an expedition to Baffin Island, but I know that I’m still a few years away from this trip being a reality. As you know, I found a granite erratic in Ohio that was moved south from the Canadian Shield by the Laurentian Ice Sheet, and I’ve been working on identifying the parent bedrock.

Today I’m announcing an extension of this project in which I will be closely observing, engaging and interpreting the glacially shaped landscapes of the Lake Erie islands over the next two years, through my field studio based on Kelleys Island.

My goal is twofold: 1) to better understand the entire region in which I found the foreign stone, and 2) to get better at telling the story of the activities of my practice so that I can be better at explaining the actual expedition to Baffin Island.

For this FIELD OFFICE season, I produced a postcard that will act as my timecard to log my activities on the island through the end of 2023. I will complete the postcard in duplicate each time I am on the island, sending one copy to my archive at the Nevada Museum of Art, and the other copy to myself for my studio archive. I will make 20 trips to the island before the end of 2023 and will publish these cards on the FIELD OFFICE project page on this website, along with video updates and ephemeral items to commemorate the work.

It’s my intent to treat this fieldwork season as much as possible like an analog of the Baffin Island expedition. Next winter I will fly onto the island and trek with snowshoes across the island pulling the stone that wants to go home behind me on a sled. I’ll spend time training on ice on frozen quarry ponds, and I’ll publish my activities in a number of places.

Which brings me to a final twist on this story of how my practice is evolving—I’ve primarily funded my practice with grants, residency stipends, and awards. I’ve only very rarely offered my work for sale, and I’ve never really produced work intended for ownership. But as I’ve gotten deeper into this story, I’ve started to realize that because my vision is so big, more than ever I need people who are invested in my practice to make these experiences happen. So, I began to plan a series of works to both commemorate the activities of my practice and also communicate in a direct, physical way with supporters like you. Stay tuned for details, but I wanted to let you know now that this opportunity to directly financially support my practice is coming, and I will be producing a series of objects to thank you for your support.

Your support has encouraged me immensely, and I cannot do this work without friends like you. Thank you for sticking with me.

- RYAN DEWEY

This phase started about two months ago when I was corresponding with Peter G Knight, Reader in Geography at Keele University and author of the clearest book on human interaction with glaciers in art and culture, and Peter asked me if I knew where this stone came from. Knowing the vastness of the Canadian Shield, I hadn't even considered that it might be possible to identify the parent bedrock until that moment. Peter mentioned that the lithology of the erratics in central England is specific enough that they can identify the outcrop that an erratic came from, and that this helps confirm the direction of the flow of the glacial ice which has long since melted away. I didn’t know if this would be possible, but I knew I needed to start talking to researchers closer to home, and Peter pointed me to Broster, Munn, and Pronk, 1997 outlining research findings from fieldwork in New Brunswick that traced past ice flow directionality by drawing inferences from the dispersal of clasts (a.k.a., erratics) in glacial till.

New Brunswick had a glacial experience that was significantly different from that of the Great Lakes region, the ice sheets over the Great Lakes were thick, in some places 3.2km, but the edges of the ice sheet were much thinner, which means that stones didn’t move as far in New Brunswick as they did in what is now the Great Lakes region. In fact, Broster et al., indicate very short train lengths for the conveyance of glacial materials, generally between 4km and 10km, but in cases where clasts have moved higher into the ice (instead of sitting underneath the glacier), ice-streaming took place that enabled stones to move as far as 26km. Terrain and geography could impact the location of a stone in a glacier, and if the glacier would sheer, say after sliding over a hill and breaking, the ice with the stone could transpose to a higher location in the pile of ice that accumulated at the bottom of the hill or cliffside. If the stone was higher in the body of ice, then that means it had more time to ride the glacier which could enable it to move much farther. So I asked Broster what he thought about distances and if it was possible for a stone to move upwards high enough to enable it to move from the Canadian Shield into Ohio, or if it would be more likely that successive re-sedimentation would have been what enabled my stone to move farther than 26km. He told me that the Great Lakes region is different, and that based on his work across Canada “‘glacial – transported’ boulders can be transported hundreds of miles (many hundreds of miles).”

I asked about re-sedimentation because over the past decade I’ve collected a number of glacial erratics in a farm field in Huron County, Ohio in a location south of where I found this granite erratic, and some of them ended up in this field because of re-sedimentation. This part of Ohio is flat because the surface is a terminal ground moraine made up of a thick layer of glacial till, and since flat land is great for farming, this glacial till is constantly being plowed over. Not to mention uplift, the phenomena where heavier materials rise to the surface. If you buy blueberries in a plastic clamshell container, then you’ve seen this happen because the larger blueberries always make their way to the top of the container while the smaller ones fall to the bottom. It’s a packing problem, and it also happens where different soil layers touch, so glacial erratics sitting in till from earlier glaciation can make their way into the layer of till from a more recent glaciation, eventually finding the surface, and occasionally being struck by a plow, like this specimen which I found in the farm field after it had been shattered into at least these 97 pieces I picked up:

This is a piece of Gowganda Tillite, a sort of fossil of a moment in an earlier glaciation in what is now Ontario. It’s actually glacial till that has been turned to stone in the same ways that other sediments undergo lithification to form horizons of shale, mudstone, siltstone; the pressure that comes from burial and layering eventually make mud into stone. So here is till from an old glacier, turned into stone, and now moved by a new glacier. It comes from the Gowganda Formation in the Huronian Subgroup, a trace of the Huronian Glaciation that occurred 2.4 billion years ago (Gya) alongside the Great Oxygenation Event responsible for the abundance of oxygen that made it possible for life to thrive. This piece of stone is at least 2 billion years old, but what is inside that stone is much older. Inside this tillite (a sedimentary stone) is an embedded igneous stone, and that igneous stone is well rounded indicating that it had been broken off from its parent bedrock and tumbled smooth by mechanical force. Since the tillite was glacial till, it is likely that the same glacier which moved the soft till had also been tumbling this hard igneous diorite cobble in the same mix. It’s also likely that the diorite is a dropstone, which according to this paper from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources states “occur when a sheet of ice or iceberg floating in a lake melts, and the heavy pebbles or cobbles sink into the lake bottom sediments” The lake in this case is a glacial lake at the front of a receding glacier in the meltwater, and the diorite might have been a piece of rock that had been transposed higher into the ice, only to be calved off into the glacial meltwater before dropping down into the milky glacial sediments at the bottom of the puddle. And this puddle happened to form 450 miles directly north of the farm field where I found this specimen. This glacial clay that is 2.4 million years old made its way 450 miles south to Ohio, but it didn’t necessarily happen in one go…this is where re-sedimentation comes into play. It is also very likely that it was slowly moved by many glaciations. But the fact remains, south of where I found my granite erratic (which presumably moved only a short 20000 years ago), there is also lithified glacial clay that is evidence of glaciation that took place 2400000000 years ago.

According to Broster, Gowganda Tillite is only one of several indicators that glacial boulders moved from Northern Ontario into Ohio, and that taken together we can know that while the stones were picked up at different points along the way (i.e., not of the same origin), we know that they traveled along the same path. So at this point, I’m sticking with my assumption that this granite erratic moved south from the Canadian Shield.

When I asked about pinpointing the granite parent rock formation, Broster’s only guidance was to look at the zircon and other minerals that are resistant to get a finite date of origin which would relate to a particular part of the Canadian Shield. So I started asking geology departments at research universities and research departments of natural history museums close to home if they could help, and my first stop was Case Western Reserve University (where I earned my MA, and where I served two appointments as a visiting researcher in cognitive science). I’m always upfront with people that I’m not a geologist, and sometimes that makes starting conversations difficult and I had to write a couple of times before I got a response and then my question was passed around before I got responses like “exploring the parentage of glacial erratics is a really difficult business and rarely done nowadays” and “the overall research value of the work is low by modern standards (they can be used as tracers of glacial movement, but those are problems nearly all consider "solved" a long time ago” and “Even when they're something visibly interesting…, the academic level of interest barely rises above "satisfy my curiosity". So the likelihood of finding someone who can say "that's from the Kirkland lakes tonalite plutons" or similar is very low.” I took these answers with a grain of salt, these responses aren’t actually as dismissive as they sound, some of the responses are filters, but others are just plain facts presented in uncluttered language. I knew I needed to be precise, so I started asking specific questions about mineral composition. I started talking with Ralph Harvey who teaches mineralogy at Case, and he mentioned that it would not be possible to distinguish between the plutons in the Canadian Shield without analysis at the isotope level.

At this point, I’m not interested in destructive methods for analysis so I wondered if traditional basic techniques from geologic classification would help, characteristics of crystal structure and mineral composition should be useful in identifying a rock specimen, and I mentioned that because my sample was phaneritic, I would be able to measure the sizes of the crystal grains as a starting point, then confirm mineral by looking at the crystal structures and Mohs hardness for each crystal, then factor in the percentage composition of the major components, take their specific gravity and calculate the estimated weight for each type of mineral, which I could then use as a proof for component identification by taking the calculated crystal weight total and matching it to the actual total weight of the stone itself. I realize there is a lot of room for error at each of those leaps in interpretation and measurement, but I wondered if in terms of a first attempt outside of isotopic analysis if that would get me anywhere.

Ralph’s response was that “igneous rock from totally different places can be astonishingly similar” and that without isotope analysis, simple petrology wouldn’t help narrow down the region of Canada, but even with the isotope data, I’ll still need to get lucky because someone would have had to already gather the isotope data for the parent pluton and published it somewhere.

I need to find another way to leverage data, but first I need to get some positive identification on the minerals in my stone. I think there might be other data besides isotope data that can help pinpoint this answer though. Let’s say my stone happens to have a significant percentage of a particular mineral, and I’m able to find plutons in the Canadian Shield that tend toward presenting a higher percentage of that particular mineral (say by correlating the ph of that higher percentage mineral with vegetation patterns as markers - which if you don’t know, soil ph is a major determining factor for what types of plants grow and where). Then this vegetation data should help define possible zones for investigation of those sections of the Canadian Shield. Currently, I’m using the ecological land units base map in arcGIS which was derived from data repositories of bioclimates, landforms, lithology and land cover, and I’m wondering if I can use that data (which already has gross parsing of vegetation), that it could help eliminate the places I shouldn’t look. Here’s a screenshot of my map:

I mentioned the Gowganda Tillite and despite the wildly different eras of transportation, including the fact that my granite erratic may have moved before, after, or contemporaneously with the transportation which originally moved the tillite, that this tillite did land 450 miles more or less dead south from the parent formation. And I asked if taking all of that into consideration, was it reasonable to think that the granite erratic had originated north of the Gowganda Formation since the granite deposition was north of the tillite deposition. At this point I’m really pressing into my strategy of eliminating options to narrow down. What I want to know is if I can cut out everything in the Canadian Shield that occurs below the Gowganda Formation, and concentrate my efforts on looking north for likely parent rock.

Other clues are at hand: The rock has considerable weathering and if I was to use a descriptor of the sort I would use for roundness in sand, I would say it is somewhere between subrounded and rounded. There is also some contact midway through the stone that I'm not sure how to describe, it kind of looks like an intrusive dike, but the intrusive material appears to be very similar in composition to the country rock, although the grains in that intrusion are oriented at a 45 degree angle from the orientation of the grains in the country stone. Maybe this is another clue I could use when filtering regions by geomorphological trends to eliminate areas. The area for 200 miles north of Gowganda tends to be acid plutons and acid volcanics, and above that area up through James Bay/Moosonee and beyond tend to be metamorphics, so I also wonder if this supports the case for eliminating a band of area just north of the Gowganda Formation, and concentrate my search on areas up through James Bay and into the hard rock formations above the 61st parallel North. All of these details have some relationship to the answer I’m seeking. I realize correlation does not equal causation and that any one clue isn’t enough, but I also know enough about the entanglement of real life to know that when threads unravel you get to see how things were woven together. So thinking about my strategy of elimination, I’m going to be systematic about this. Which brings me back to the very obvious point that I can't do anything until I have a positive ID on my stone.

I ran all of this by Ralph and asked how he thinks I should proceed and he insists that I need isotope analysis and that I’d want “at the very least, Rb/Sr and Nd/Sm analysis, both stable and radiogenic to get an age and a plot of the two isotopic systems against each other. Zircon-based geochemistry and dating would be useful too.” So this is a request for help: If you work in a lab that can do this kind of analysis, and your lab wants to get involved with this project, drop me a line - I’d love to talk.

Long story short, stones from very far away have moved very long distances over very long periods of time, and it’s the opinion of several geologists that my stone did come from some portion of the Canadian Shield, but we won’t know where until I get some better data.

—RYAN DEWEY

First I looked into the possibility of driving the stone north along the James Bay Road to Radisson and then over to La Grande and ultimately to Chisasibi where I thought I would be able to take a plane to Whapmagoostui, the northernmost Cree village in Quebec. The name means “the place of the beluga” and it is on the Great Whale River, and I thought I could leave the stone there. But I couldn’t find a plane that would depart from Chisasibi and land in Whapmagoostui, and I wasn’t able to find a charter. Fortunately in my search I started looking at route maps from CanadianNorth:

Originally I had planned to keep this trip below the 60th Parallel North which according to my agent at the Canadian Border Services Agency would have made permitting much easier, but when I started looking at this route map, I realized that heading into the Northwest Passages would get me very close to the Barnes Ice Cap. That’s significant because this ice cap is the last remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the glacier which originally moved this stone during the last ice age. Instead of tossing this stone into the Arctic Ocean and leaving it behind, it became clear that for this project to be as beautiful as possible, I must take this glacial erratic to the very ice that made it into an erratic in the first place.

- RYAN DEWEY

“Closure of 3 vectors indicates the possibility of art production”

My wife bought me an exhibition postcard made by Carl Andre and gave it to me for Christmas last year. It was from a 1976 exhibition called Prime Terrane at the Portland Center for Visual Arts and included stones that Carl Andre had found and placed atop concrete blocks. I was happy to receive this postcard because there aren’t many out there. There is this one in the Wayne State archives, there is one referenced in the materials from Sculpture as Place, a Dia:Beacon exhibition, which is probably the same one that is referenced in this PDF from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s catalog, listing it as being from the collection of the artist.

Anyway, I have one, and this is a photo of my edition:

What strikes me about this offset printed card is the diagram. It succinctly describes the convergence of three requirements along three continuums which are necessary for a work of art to manifest: the artist, the materials, and the money.

I already have the glacial stone, and it has some objective characteristics that stand in relation to the subjective characteristics of me as the artist (including my body, my flexibility to pick up and leave for a third of a year, et cetera). These are also entangled with the need to finance an expedition-scale project like this.

I posted yesterday about not advancing to the final round of Creative Capital for this project for this award cycle. My budget for this project is 12 pages long, and surpasses the CC award amount anyway. Even if I eventually land an award for this project, I’ll still need to bring other partners to the table.

When I look at this image on the Andre postcard it is clear to me that there is another temporality at play in the movement of this granite stone to the Arctic Ocean, and it’s not the temporality of deep time, or the pace of a slow walk north. It is the economic pace and the timing of institutional support that will determine when this subjective artist (with all of my contingencies and relational entanglements) takes this objective stone (which isn’t going anywhere on its own) to the mouth of the Hudson Bay.

One way or another, it’s going to happen, but not until I can pull together the institutional support. If your institution can help, I’m happy to talk.

- RYAN DEWEY

1. Climate Change & Sustainability

2. Environment & Ecology

3. Alternate & Future Worlds

Unfortunately, though, as I was preparing this post, I received notice that I did not make it through the second round of evaluations. While it is a set-back in one sense, I feel confident about the progress I am making, and I now have the luxury of spending more time upfront in the planning process. Applications open again in six months and by that time I will also have spent more time designing the equipment I will need for this project.

- RYAN DEWEY

After the talk I took questions while holding the boulder. Unfortunately I did not transcribe the Q & A session.

Thank you Hanna [Hölling] for that lovely introduction. 

And thank you to Johannes [Hedinger] , Hanna [Hölling], and the Institute for inviting me to speak today. 

This Stone Wants To Go Home. 

Standing at the edge of the canyon or moving up the side of a mountain inspires a moment of geologic awe. 

Our bodies help us make sense of enormous spaces… we comprehend the scale of a space relative to the size of our bodies.

The experience of feeling small in a vast space is exhilarating. 

But thinking about geologic deep time does not inspire that same sense of exhilaration. 

It’s difficult to comprehend a billion years; we use our bodies to make sense out of an enormous space, but when it comes to enormous lengths of time the only frames of reference that are available to us are our lifespan and our notion of generations. 

[Alex Grunenfelder for scale]

Things complicate when we talk about planetary change that happens over time. 

The hidden complexity of planetary change is extremely difficult to visualize because we don’t live at planetary scale, we live at local scale. 

And our physical experience of space is limited to the moment in which we occupy that space. 

To look back in time we have to build simulations and models. 

Here is a model of the planet before the last ice age, and before sea level rose to fill the Hudson Bay in northern Ontario. Before the Laurentian Ice Sheet melted into the Great Lakes which are absent from this image.

In a way, maps become the tools we use to think about the spaces we do not currently find ourselves in, as much as they are tools for locating ourselves in physical space when we use them for navigation. 

Here we see the Great Lakes and the Hudson Bay have manifested, as well as borders. 

This is a geologic map of the Canadian Shield, one of the oldest rock formations to survive to our present time. 

I show this because during the last ice age, continental glaciers broke off and pushed south massive pieces of the Canadian Shield into the Northern United States. 

We’re going to talk a lot about these rocks in the slides to follow. 

Here is a map of the southernmost Great Lake, it is Lake Erie, and it’s nearly a stone’s throw from where I am standing right now. 

On the western end of the lake there is an island called Kelley’s Island, it looks like this:

You can walk around this island in a single day. 

It’s a nice chunk of limestone that popped up at the edge of the limestone basin that cups the Great Lakes. It’s Devonian era limestone from a Silurian sea that evaporated 300 million years ago and was subsequently covered with half a kilometer of glacial clay during the last ice age.

On the North end of Kelley’s Island is a set of grooves carved by Canadian granite glacial erratics under the weight of the 3200 meter thick Laurentian Ice Sheet.

These are massive grooves that remind me a little of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in scale. 

You could park buses in these grooves.

Here’s an image of the fluting and carving from the erratics. 

As a side note: In a week I’ll be visiting these grooves again because I’m currently carving a series of Alpenhorns, and inside the bells of these horns I’m carving models of these glacial grooves so that when the horns are sounded, their voices will be shaped by the contours of the grooves.

Here’s a texture image of the grooves. It’s amazing these have lasted until today, Kelley’s Island was once covered in these grooves, this is the last bit that remains. 

The entire Great Lakes region is covered with 500 meters of glacial clay, and it’s full of glacial erratics. I’m constantly collecting these from farm fields as they are turned over when soil is tilled each year.

I have shelves and shelves of them in my studio.

I started thinking about the shape of these grooves and the process involved in producing them. And I wanted to understand it better.

And so I built a hand tool that is essentially a miniature glacier with three tiny granite erratics.

I wanted to empathize with a glacier and experience the agency of the glacier as it carves stone.

Here is the hand tool on a slab of limestone.

I advance and retreat like a glacier for 20 minutes of continuous motion until the glacier breaks apart, calving and dropping the granite stones on the limestone field. 

Back to erratics. Here’s a 17kg Canadian Granite Erratic I found in a limestone quarry.  I’ve used this as an object to think about timescales, to think about geologic migration, and to build moments of contemplation for viewers to meditate on deep time.

Here is one of those experiences. At the start of a recent solo exhibition about climate change and agriculture, I placed this stone next to an ice box and had participants chill their hands for 30 seconds before touching the stone. The piece is called: Remember for This Stone A Colder Past and you can find it posted (here) on my instagram page @geocog

The networked nature of climate change requires us to anchor parts of the problem onto discrete examples that illustrate the larger system. 

A plastic straw can collapse an ecosystem, not just in how we discard it, but also in everything it takes to produce and distribute it. 

Luxury kitchens are a great place to start to think about landscape. 

Here is a reconstructed granite boulder that I made from scraps left over from custom kitchen counter installation. 

A granite countertop takes 2 weeks to move from a quarry in China to a retailer in California. 

That’s 10,000 kilometers in two weeks time. 

A glacier could never move a piece of granite 10,000 kilometers in as fast as 2 weeks.

Hanna [Hölling] talked earlier today about “fashioning potent metaphors of the term landscape in critical grounds”…Here I’m talking about the supply chain as an infrastructural landscape, and one that has surpassed geologic forces in terms of the migration of natural materials.

Supply chains have surpassed geologic forces, not just in terms of accelerated atmospheric carbon from the mechanism of the supply chain, but also in purpose of the supply chain which moves materials from point A to point B with maximum efficiency. 

Again, a glacier could never move a piece of granite 10,000 kilometers in as fast as 2 weeks. 

I want to think about my role in planetary change, and I also want to collaborate with the natural world. 

Granite is magma that has cooled slowly at different rates. What we call lava stone is the same magma, just cooled faster at the surface. As granite slowly cools, different minerals precipitate out of the chemical composition of that magma producing crystals, garnets, and other stones. 

It’s why countertops look so interesting. 

Here I have taken the granite dust from a countertop manufacturer and melted it into magma in my foundry to show how it’s practically the same as lava.

Here is another reconstructed granite boulder that I made from tiles I bought at a major retailer who imported them from India.

But back to this stone. 

One day I was walking in a limestone quarry in Ohio and I came across this granite boulder. 

It’s a glacial erratic, and I can be sure, because there is no surface granite in Ohio, and also because the entire region was covered with continental glaciers during the Wisconsin Glacial Episode, glaciers that were 3200 meters thick, glaciers that covered the Great Lakes region with half a kilometer of glacial clay. 

This stone moved south from the Canadian Shield into Ohio maybe 1600 kilometers over thousands of years. 

That’s a long way for a stone to move, no matter how fast it moves.

When Hanna [Hoelling] talks about rescaling, I want to know what did this rock see? How did the continental glacier experience the North American continent as it carried this stone? What temporalities has this stone experienced?

As I said, I’ve shown this in other exhibitions to help people contemplate deep time, but recently I’ve begun to see it as something more than an object.

Perhaps by reminding this stone of what it felt like to be cold inside a glacier, I had teased the stone, or awakened it. Because Now this stone wants to go home. 

In a way this stone is a statement from the last ice age. It is a word pushed south and spoken into the landscape. Left behind for the place to remember. It is an utterance, and it has meaning…semiotically, semantically, and spatially. 

While reading the landscape I picked up this meaning, and understood what it meant because I had landscape literacy of the place where I found it. This is a kind of situated knowledge. 

Now some 20,000 years after a glacier dropped this stone in Ohio, I am going to walk north 1600km to throw it into the mouth of the Arctic Ocean at the Hudson Bay, why?  so that it is ready for the next ice age of course.

It’s a kind of resetting of the glacial field. 

I want to walk because it is the most glacial pace I can take. 

I want to develop the same landscape knowledge that this stone developed as it traveled south 20,000 years ago. 

This project is also a kind of conversation between the last ice age and the next one. The stone is a message that is being passed back and forth like notes between friends in class. I’m just in the middle, along for the ride.

As I said, part of my practice is to empathize with geologic forces, to understand them by replicating their actions at human scale. This stone moved 1600 km over thousands of years, and I will carry, push, and pull this stone (three actions glaciers use to move erratics) in a custom fabricated cart as I move on foot northward to the Hudson Bay over several months, at a rate of ~16km a day. 

Along the way north, I’ll stop at 160kilometer increments and invite people into a conversation about this stone, land, ownership, climate change, and deep time. It’s not just about fostering “conversation” between two distant ice ages; I’m interested in this being a project that actually gets people talking. And I want people to help welcome this stone as it returns home. A kind of intrepid geologic agent. 

This year, on the 15th of September the Arctic Ice reached its second lowest extent in recorded history. Multiyear ice is thinning and melting faster. 

Atmospheric Carbon has delayed the next ice age which should be happening 50,000 years from now, but now will not take place until 100,000 years from now, or longer.

But this stone is going to be ready for the next ice age.

I’ve never been to the Arctic, but this is what the shore of the Hudson Bay looks like.

This stone can’t wait to get home. 

As I’ve planned this project I’ve reflected on some of the art that has influenced me and I want to take a few minutes to talk about these projects because they are the kinds of projects that have helped me rescale my perspective to that of the stone.

NB: Slides 26-33 have been omitted from this post and are discussed in another post.

In closing, this is a poster I made for myself a long time ago. It says: Your Experience Of the Earth is Limited by the Human Condition. 

I want to suggest an update, that when you situate yourself in the agency of a glacier, or take the viewpoint of an erratic, you can experience new multitudes.

- RYAN DEWEY

I want to make something beautiful that draws people into consideration of how they relate personally to nature, to granite and to ice. I’m always experimenting with helping people get physical with these materials.

In 2018 I produced my ritual work Remember For This Stone A Colder Past. A chest of ice sat beside the granite glacial erratic and participants were invited to immerse their hands in ice and then touch this glacial stone to remind it of real cold.

This stone moved south unobserved, and it sat for tens of thousands of years without anyone recognizing that it was out of place. I want to give people a chance to pay attention to this stone and to encourage it during this warm interglacial period.

When I take this stone north to the mouth of the Arctic Ocean, I intend to stop for community events every 100 miles (160km). Participants will be invited to touch this stone as it moves north on its way home (knowing that because of climate change the next ice age won’t touch this stone for ~100,000 years).

- RYAN DEWEY

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

Title: Remember For This Stone A Colder Past (2018)

Materials: ice, glacial boulder, ritual protocol, stainless steel box.

Description: Visitors are instructed to plunge their hands into the ice box for 30 seconds to chill their hands before touching the glacial stone so that their cold hands will remind the stone what real cold feels like. Visitors are encourage to whisper a blessing of cold to the stone. Part of solo exhibition Sowing Seeds of Discontent at Baldwin Wallace University. Viewed 43,529 times on Instagram.

Rationale: I’ve included this because it is the same stone I’ll repatriate to Canada, and this is one of the rituals that will take place in the various exhibitions and community events along the way.

When I think back at the art I’ve loved over the years, it’s no surprise to me that I’m moving a stone on foot northward 1,000 miles (1600km) to the mouth of the Arctic Ocean.

For this specific project I’m influenced by specific projects of several artists:

David Nash’s Wooden Boulder, in which a white oak tree was carved into a boulder that Nash released into a river in 1978 and proceeded to track the movements of this “stone” over the next several decades until it disappeared.

Matt Baker’s Erratic, in which hikers encounter a boulder in a field and are invited to drag the erratic as far and as long as they like, leaving it wherever they decide is far enough to move the stone.

Com & Com’s emphasis on conviviality in Bloch as a Swiss spruce travels to every continent acting as a sort of global talking stick:

Richard Long’s rare and concise statement “I like the simplicity of walking, the simplicity of stones.”

The ideas of displacement and replacement in Michael Heizer’s works.

Francis Alÿs’ Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, in which he pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts nine hours later:

Francis Alÿs, Mexico City 1997 (public domain)

Section XIX of Conrad Aiken’s poem Prelude for Memnon describing the quiet changes taking place in the natural world:

XIX

Watch long enough, and you will see the leaf

Fall from the bough. Without a sound it falls:

And soundless meets the grass … And so you have

A bare bough, and a dead leaf in dead grass.

Something has come and gone. And that is all.

But what were all the tumults in this action?

What wars of atoms in the twig, what ruins, 

Fiery and disastrous, in the leaf? 

Timeless the tumult was, but gave no sign.

Only, the leaf fell, and the bough is bare.

This is the world: there is no more than this.

The unseen and disastrous prelude, shaking 

The trivial act from the terrific action.

Speak: and the ghosts of change, past and to come, 

Throng the brief word. The maelstrom has us all.

I often think about the tumult was in the glacier that moved this granite boulder. How did it break off, and what did it look like when it started the journey? The soft roundness of the stone that I hold in my hands does not show the fissured and angular facets of the fractured rock it started out as when the glacier found it.

And lastly, Hamish Fulton’s walking works like Glacial Boulder, and the 2016 exhibition A Decision To Choose Only Walking at Galerie Tschudi in Switzerland.

- RYAN DEWEY

I’m in a long game with ice ages, past and future. The glacier that moved this granite boulder melted approximately 20,000 years ago. That glacier made the last move on this stone. Now it is my turn. By carrying it north and throwing it into the confines of the Hudson Bay, the next time an ice age returns (~100,000 years from now), that stone will be back where it started, ready to move again. I’m just cuing it up. resetting the glacial field. I’ll document the walk to present it for audiences, but really I’m in an extended conversation with some geologic friends separated by deep time.

- RYAN DEWEY

Part of my practice is to empathize with geologic forces, to understand them by replicating their actions at human scale. This stone moved 1,000 miles over thousands of years which is fast for a stone, and much father than a stone would move on its own in any natural sort of way. I could fly this stone north, but then I would miss out on the slowness and the overwhelming landscapes that this stone already once encountered. To approximate the glacial speed and to fathom the scale, I will carry, push, and pull this stone (three actions glaciers use to move erratics) as slowly as I can in a custom fabricated cart as I move on foot northward to the Hudson Bay over three months at a rate of 10 miles per day.

Every 100 miles I’ll stop for community events to advocate for ice, invite communities to touch this stone, and discuss perceived local effects of climate change with residents. I’ll document these events, community conversations, texts, images, film from the journey, and objects of the expedition to produce a book and an exhibition to call attention to this moment humans occupy between two distant ice ages, past and to come.

I’ll use this blog to share the project as it progresses from idea to memory, contextualizing the connections between humans, landscapes, and climate, while also documenting the design process and expedition planning process.

- RYAN DEWEY