Supraglacial riverbed (2022)

This temporary terrain is made of chips from an eroded riverbed. The chips are laid out as a poetry on the influences that transform our landscapes over time. That which lives in and wanders with the ice. That which is laid bare by the retraction of the ice – and that which the ice lets go of underway.

The clay has undergone a process of excavation and drying. Along with the silt it has been fired to draw out the chemically bound water from the minerals. The terrain has been built in 40 degrees heat as a meditation on the water of the earth, the circuit of water, its conversion, wandering and absence on a summer like this where 46 pct. of Europe experiences extreme drought.

About the materials:
The Moesgaard clay was deposited during the latest Eocene (56-34 m.y.) during the formation of an ice age on the Southern Hemisphere that bound the seawater in ice capes and thereby drained the world’s oceans which let to a global sea level drop.

The Hiawatha silt consists of finely ground bedrock that rivers of melt water has led out from under the ice sheet the for millions of years during the rendering and withdrawal of the ice.
The silt contains of sediments of shocked zircon and quartz; a mineral deposition from the Hiawatha meteor that hit the earth 58 million years ago at a time when Greenland was covered in temperate rainforest.