Held in Thaw
(2026)
This installation reflects on the glacial forces that shaped the land on which Vicksburg stands. The region’s moraines were formed approximately 12,000 years ago, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, depositing stones, gravel, sand, and sediments that continue to define this landscape today. The materials gathered for this work: granite erratics, gneiss, quartzite, basalt, limestone, sandstone, gravel, and sand are remnants of that ancient thaw. Geological witnesses carried across vast distances and left behind as the ice slowly receded.
The work consists of 60 vertical metal tubes, each holding a frozen sphere containing stones and sediments collected from Vicksburg’s glacial moraine. Within each sphere, the materials are arranged according to a gradient of glacial activity: larger rocks transition into smaller stones, gravel, and sand, echoing the processes by which glaciers transport and deposit matter: from heavy erratics to fine sediments. As sunlight melts the ice, each frozen sphere gradually releases and exposes what it contains, reenacting in compressed time the slow geological process through which glaciers reveal and shape land.
I think of melting here not as disappearance, but as a state of transformation. A threshold where matter changes form and memory becomes visible. These ice spheres hold within them a temporary suspension of geological time, containing in frozen stillness materials once carried in motion by glacial force. Their thaw becomes a way to make perceptible the otherwise imperceptible scale of geological time: a temporary and accelerated unfolding of processes that originally occurred over millions of years. As each sphere melts, it slowly reveals buried histories, exposing layers of stone, gravel, and sediment that were once transported across vast distances and are now released into stillness. In this sense, each melting sphere acts as a small reenactment of the retreating glacier itself, making visible the layered material histories embedded within the land.
To speak about water here is to speak from a distance. From a landscape where the glacier is no longer present as ice, but persists through the materials it left behind, through memory, and through the ways this land is experienced today. These fragments become a way of sensing what we cannot experience firsthand. A way of imagining a body of ice through its traces. A distant body of ice, a past movement, a time beyond human scale. These small accumulations of stone and sediment operate as metonymies—pieces of land that stand in for something larger, something distant, something that exceeds our scale. They hold the possibility of imagining, of recalling, of sensing through matter. An intimate encounter with something vast.
Though the glacier that formed this terrain disappeared thousands of years ago, its presence remains active in the contours of daily life. The moraine landscape still shapes how water moves through the region, where fertile soils accumulate, where wetlands form, and where roads, towns, farms, and homes are built. The glacier is absent as ice, yet still present in the physical conditions that organize human habitation. In this way, the work reflects on a symbiotic relationship between geology and daily life: how ancient natural forces continue to structure the ways bodies move through and relate to place.
By placing each sphere at eye level, the work invites a different kind of relation. A face-to-face encounter. An intimacy with what is usually underfoot. There is something in the stones themselves, their softened edges, their rounded forms, that speaks of movement, of friction, erosion, time. Like ice, they have lost their edges. Their surfaces hold the trace of having been carried, pressed, transformed.
The vertical supports create a face-to-face relationship between body and geology. There is an invitation here to slow down. To stay with these gradual processes. Melting alters the speed at which we perceive—slowing thinking, slowing looking, slowing the body. It opens a space to consider the relation between human time and deep-earth time. Between what we can witness and what exceeds us.
This gesture connects to my broader practice, which explores how landscapes hold memory and how materials reveal intertwined histories of ecology, place, and human perception. Across my work, I am drawn to natural processes like erosion, sedimentation, weathering, and melting as forms of narration. Here, the glacier is understood not only as a force that once shaped this terrain, but as a continuing presence whose afterlife remains embedded in the land and in the ways people inhabit it.
This piece intends to evoke a form of observation. to the subtle sensory elements of the environment, to the gestures inscribed in matter, and to the memories held within the land.
It asks how we might extend our sensory awareness, how we might understand our bodies as continuous with the landscapes we inhabit, and how we might engage with processes of change not only as loss, but as conditions for perception, relation, and transformation.
How do we remain with change?
How do we surrender to it?
How do we extend our sensory threads toward what feels distant?
The work becomes a space to be present. To slow down and tune with melting rhythms. To notice gestures held in matter, to the memory embedded in land.
And in that time, perhaps to understand that our bodies are not separate from this landscape, but extensions of it.