Essay Nested Inside Two Halves of a Peat Core

Book artist Oralee Nudson dried out a core sample of frozen peat and turned it into a book cover. It encloses an essay I wrote about peat, permafrost, the Holocene, and trickster stories.

Curiosity piqued by the essay’s Holocene thread, Oralee made a sculptural rendition of a graph showing temperature anomalies of the past 20,000 years. That’s the metalwork you see with a raven’s wide wings coasting across millennia.

Essay-wise, some of the words in this piece are my own. I’ve also collaged experimentally from notebook pages volunteered by Kelsey Aho, Susan Grace, Margo Klass, Mary Beth Leigh, Dana Lindauer, Debbie Moderow, Jen Moss, Oralee Nudson, Jeremy Pataky, Teresa Shannon, and Molissa Udevitz, all fellow members of my ITOC cohort (an arts-science collaboration you can read about here). This and other transdisciplinary works will be on exhibit at the Bear Gallery in Fairbanks during the month of September, 2022.

Photos courtesy of book artist Oralee Nudson.
Fonts: Canada 1500 by Ray Larabie and Adobe Jenson Pro by Robert Slimbach. Website by Scout James.