Do you want to take the short-cut or the long-cut?  is part of an ongoing collection of works about land: human use and relationship to land, places of shared experience and memory, complex and conflicting societal relationships to resource exploitation and industry, ideas of development, commons, nations, rights, and the experience of snow and ice as land. The thinking behind the work has been percolating and mind-mapped over the past ten years, as personal understandings of cold, land, and ways of life have grown from cherished time spent in Inuit Nunangat (Inuit homeland in the Canadian arctic) creating collaborative and community art projects, primarily their ongoing project with Kinngait youth, Embassy of Imagination.

The work employs visual metaphor, for instance, adapting forms of ancient documents. Using personally collected materials both raw and man-made, originating from the places that the work references, including iron ore mined from north Baffin Island.

Several works depict ephemeral wind-blown snow-forms that are both beautiful and a tool for navigation in the North. The varied processes involved in these works naturally have a strong visual connection: the fine ridges of layered 3D-printing, the detailed and linear carving for hand-printed linocut work, and the natural process of wind chiseling the original snow-forms. Depicting these snow-forms has intimate and broad meaning. It is a personal and tedious process that supports reminiscing, missing a place, preserving the elapsed moment. The work also reflects on the precarity of the climate and by extension the threat to mobility as it is tied to the ice and weather.

 installation view: Do you want to take the short-cut or the long-cut?