the matanuska project 2011
matanuska glacier, alaska
collection of photographs
This project began in 2010 when Amy Johnson, bewitched by the glacier blue waters of Alaska, went back home to Seattle and began hand-dyeing and printing on silk in an attempt to capture and remember a geological essence. A year later, still transfixed by the glacial blue waters, she transformed the silk fabric into a full blown gown and drove back to Alaska. After two months of camping near a valley glacier four miles wide by 27 miles long, this performance by the artist was born. These photographs are markers of that moment revealing a time of change and growth and new beginnings after which Johnson packed up her things and migrated north to Alaska for what would be nearly a decade. She did not know at the time that this work would become the first in a series of four - this one she would call “Spring.” Nor was she aware that this work would evolve to represent another new beginning - the shocking, breathtaking, unwelcomed and harrowing spring of the Anthropocene — the global glacier melt.
“Once upon a time, there was an artist, and she loved the earth, and the earth loved her, spoke to her, seduced her with sapphire blue, the pull so strong, she packed up her life and moved north north north, so she could see that color, get close to that color. With her, she brought a dress, a gown she’d stitched and dyed and silkscreened and printed, blue and green and gold and rust and white, and she wore it and walked on a glacier, the landscape harsh and cold and disappearing.”