Limnologies (2024)
A collaborative artwork with Claudia O’Steen.

Limnologies is a large-scale installation and the culmination of two years of  fieldwork on an island in Lake Superior, where the artists lived and worked off grid for two subsequent summers. Combining their research and work on the island with countless hours of studio and material experiments, the installation deeply explores the interplay of water, weather and geology. The title ‘Limnologies’ refers to the artists’ varied and extensive attempts to observe understand weather patterns occurring on the lake, ranging from systematic to absurd to poetic. Simultaneously, the project explores the effect of weather conditions and changing climate on human psychology.

The work utilizes documentation obsessively collected via a series of site-responsive, portable sculptures that function as observational mechanisms. The instruments poetically measure wind, waves, visibility, water level, and temperature, exploring both the possibilities and limitations afforded by perceptual observation. The artists engaged with the sky as cinema, extensively documenting color and clouds, which revealed geographically distant wildfires. Through a series of interconnected systems, the work responds to weather conditions through the production of drawing and sound. It additionally exists as performance (via documentation), video, writing and installation.

The work posits that far from being static, island geology is a dynamic, living entity that continues to shape and be shaped by changing climate. Scientific research into this region points to a series of entangled ecological systems whose complex interplay is difficult to comprehend and little understood.