Glacial Till

A medial moraine forms when two glaciers merge. Throughout their slow seep from peak to sea, glaciers accumulate rocks and sediments along their edges from rockfalls and avalanches. If two glaciers meet, the accumulated debris forms a single seam, a place marking the coming-together-of. 

This paper describes one such medial moraine: the ongoing collaboration of a visual artist and a glaciologist teaching and practicing art-science on the Juneau Icefield, an interconnected system of glaciers on Lingít Aaní (Tlingit Land) that straddles the border between Alaska, USA and British Columbia, CA. We (the authors, Dr. Elizabeth Case and Hannah Perrine Mode) use the identifying terms ”scientist” and “artist” loosely, primarily as markers of the origin of the debris that form the moraine that is our working relationship. Through our work together—teaching, art making, organizing, friendship—our intellectual, emotive, and embodied ways of doing and thinking have thickened, a kind of diagenesis that binds without homogenizing. While we still draw from, and reside primarily in, our disciplinary origins, we both readily engage with, participate in, and make use of multiple, diffracting epistemologies. Reflecting on this long-term collaboration between us as educators and researchers working at the intersection of environmental art and glaciology, we explore how our individual and collaborative practices have evolved over the last decade and impacted the program we teach in as a whole.