Submersed Landscapes

In "Submersed Landscapes", I’m engaged with the idea that the ecosystem has agency, and that a rendering of the land can be expressed not only as an image, but also revealed chemically through its materiality in a photographic process. For this series, I used water collected from the Athabasca Glacier and combined it with charcoal from a proscribed burn site in Banff and Labrador tea and Fireweed collected outside the National Park. I first moved to Banff National Park in 2003 and have been hiking in the region since that time. Over the last 20 years, I have also witnessed the change in the mountains due to climate change – from rapidly melting glaciers in the alpine to increased summer heat and extreme forest fires. In 2025, while on a guided trek across the Athabasca Glacier, I learned that the ash from forest fires is accelerating glacier melt. Through this series, I am thinking about the ways that glacial melt, forest fires, and alpine flora can interact with images of the land affected by these same processes of destruction and regeneration . The results are surreal, quasi-psychedelic imagery that feature the chemical imprint of the ecosystem on the emulsion, and I see the effects on the film as a collaboration with the materiality of the landscape itself.