Desirée Patterson: Interglacial
When: July 11-March 20, 2027
Where: The Reach Gallery Museum, 32388 Veterans Way, Abbotsford
Info: thereach.ca
At the centre of Desirée Patterson’s new exhibition is a 15-metre-wide immersive textile installation.
“It’s been a monster,” the Vancouver artist says with a laugh, speaking from outside the gallery while crews install the piece, entitled Still in Place. “I’ve been working on this sculpture for over a year.”
Constructed from more than 100 handmade cyanotype panels, the suspended sculpture resembles a mountain landscape hanging in mid-air. Visitors can walk beneath it, lie on a meditation platform and listen to recordings captured on glaciers during fieldwork.
“I’m trying to make people feel like they’re walking into a glacial topography,” she says. “You’re surrounded by recession. The sound is ice melting. You’re immersed within this landform.”
The work began on Place Glacier, near Pemberton.
Using a 200-year-old photographic process known as cyanotype, Patterson treated large cotton panels with light-sensitive chemistry and exposed them in remote alpine environments. Many of the panels were created directly on Place Glacier during a multi-way field expedition with glaciologist Dr. Brian Menounos.
The logistics were formidable.
The materials had to be flown into the backcountry by helicopter alongside scientific equipment. Every step of the process, from transporting the textiles to washing and finishing them afterward, required careful planning.
“I made 3,500 square feet of fabric,” she says. “Actually, I made too much.”
The resulting patchwork combines panels created on glaciers across the world, including British Columbia’s Athabasca Glacier and high-altitude ice fields in Colombia’s Andes. As meltwater flowed across the treated fabric, it left branching blue patterns that recorded fleeting moments of glacial change.
Although each panel was created at a different location and time, together they form a cohesive landscape.
“When you walk underneath, you’re surrounded by blue,” she says. “The light comes through the fabric and it feels almost like being inside a cave of ice.”
The piece is part of an exhibition that is the culmination of her tenure as artist-in-residence for Canada’s contribution to the United Nations’ International Year of Glaciers Preservation. Over the past 12 months, Patterson has collaborated with glaciologists, wildfire researchers and hydrologists, joining scientific field expeditions and transforming their data into large-scale contemporary artworks. In March, during the celebrations for World Day for Glaciers, she presented a preview of this new series at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Visitors to her Parker Street studio at last year’s Eastside Culture Crawl were also given a sneak peak of early versions of some of the work.
Other installations throughout the exhibition draw upon decades of glacier photography, wildfire ecology research and climate modelling.
One room features a giant lenticular work based on photographs from the Mountain Legacy Project, allowing viewers to see more than a century of glacial retreat as they move around the piece. Another incorporates recordings of birds returning to forests after wildfire. Elsewhere, visitors encounter enlarged images of ice cores, scientific equations and video installations exploring the relationship between fire, water and ice.
Patterson says she is motivated by a desire to bridge the gap between scientific research and public understanding, and to relay a simple message: it’s not too late.
“We’re not doomed,” she says. “There is still time to change the trajectory.”
As her work demonstrates, scientific advances in modelling, mapping and measuring glacial change are generating not only new research, but new ways of communicating that research to the public. Researchers are now able to model glacial loss and climate impacts with increasing precision, helping policy-makers understand both the risks ahead and what can be done to change the current trajectory.
The challenge, she says, isn’t simply scientific. It requires political will, public engagement and individual action.
“The scientists are providing solutions to policy-makers,” she says. “They’re providing ways that we can mitigate the worst of it.”
While major changes must happen at government and industry levels, she says individuals still have a role to play through voting, advocacy and everyday choices.
“I think everybody has a piece of the mosaic of change,” she says. “Some are going to be larger than others.”
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