The Last Glacier: Wind River
A project by Ian van Coller, Professor, School of Film & Photography
The Last Glacier: Wind River is a collaboration between three artists and a scientist, the intent of which is to produce a limited-edition artist book that documents the melting glaciers in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. In August 2023 I will hike into the Wind Rivers with my collaborators Todd Anderson, Carsten Braun PhD, and Bruce Crownover, to record some of the rapidly melting glaciers in the mountain range. Over eight days we plan to trek to nine of the remaining glaciers, and conduct fieldwork, including re-photographing and sketching the glaciers. Upon return to our studios, we will produce editions of photographic and woodcut prints. Dr. Braun will interpret my landscape photographs by annotating directly onto the prints, while Anderson and Crownover will produce editions of reductive woodblock prints. The resulting prints will be bound into a mammoth size limited-edition of fifteen artist books that memorializes the glaciers of the Wind River Range at a specific point in time. This project is part of an ongoing body of work on declining glacier landscapes around the globe which in a decade has resulted in the publication of seven editions of artist books.