At the centre of Vancouver artist Desirée Patterson's new exhibition is a 15-metre-wide immersive textile installation that brings glacial science to life. The suspended sculpture, titled Still in Place, is constructed from more than 100 handmade cyanotype panels and resembles a mountain landscape hanging in mid-air. Visitors can walk beneath it, lie on a meditation platform, and listen to recordings captured on glaciers during fieldwork.
A year-long artistic and scientific collaboration
“It’s been a monster,” Patterson said with a laugh, speaking from outside the gallery while crews installed the piece. “I’ve been working on this sculpture for over a year.” The work is the culmination of her tenure as artist-in-residence for Canada’s contribution to the United Nations’ International Year of Glaciers Preservation. Over the past 12 months, she has collaborated with glaciologists, wildfire researchers and hydrologists, joining scientific field expeditions and transforming their data into large-scale contemporary artworks.
The logistics were formidable. The materials had to be flown into the backcountry by helicopter alongside scientific equipment. “I made 3,500 square feet of fabric,” she said. “Actually, I made too much.”
Cyanotype on the glacier
Using a 200-year-old photographic process known as cyanotype, Patterson treated large cotton panels with light-sensitive chemistry and exposed them in remote alpine environments. Many of the panels were created directly on Place Glacier, near Pemberton, during a multi-day field expedition with glaciologist Dr. Brian Menounos. As meltwater flowed across the treated fabric, it left branching blue patterns that recorded fleeting moments of glacial change.
The resulting patchwork combines panels created on glaciers across the world, including British Columbia’s Athabasca Glacier and high-altitude ice fields in Colombia’s Andes. “When you walk underneath, you’re surrounded by blue,” she said. “The light comes through the fabric and it feels almost like being inside a cave of ice.”
Immersive experience of glacial recession
“I’m trying to make people feel like they’re walking into a glacial topography,” Patterson said. “You’re surrounded by recession. The sound is ice melting. You’re immersed within this landform.” The exhibition, titled Desirée Patterson: Interglacial, runs from July 11 to March 20, 2027 at The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford. In March, during the celebrations for World Day for Glaciers, Patterson presented a preview of this new series at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Visitors to her Parker Street studio at last year’s Eastside Culture Crawl were also given a sneak peek of early versions of some of the work.
