Where we are is here...(after Orkney filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait)

This project explores the human relationship with glaciers from the perspective of a non-expert like myself. Glaciers are macro scale icey breathing entities retreating, contracting and disappearing, together with their ‘glacio-script’ language and tools that describe and map them. The project is viewed through my long-term collaboration and interactions with renowned Icelandic glaciologist Oddur Sigurðsson and his extensive 3D stereoscopic slide collection. Oddur mapped all the glaciers in Iceland from a plane at 10,000ft and developed a large collection of 3D stereoscopic images taken from the 1960s to 2000s. I have been collaborating with Oddur at the Icelandic Meteorological Office since 2016 throughout my creative practice on the ‘Papay Probe’ project, where Orkney islanders sent a glacier testing probe to the Myrdalsjökull glacier: https://www.saoirsehiggins.org/art-projects/papayprobe, and my documentation film work with the Icelandic Glaciological Society - scientists and volunteers taking care of glacier monitoring with annual field expeditions taking core samples of ice and snow. According to Oddur, Iceland acts as a smaller-scale benchmark of future changes that will take place in larger Arctic-Antarctic ice. My research in this project investigates this inter-scalar positioning and benchmarking, the ‘overview’ image looking down to earth from distant satellites, the stereoscopic photo taken from a plane, and the ‘ground truthing’ view up close on the land with these different narratives echo-locating with each other. The technological viewpoint presented by experts minus people, versus what we see, feel, and touch with our senses. It is particularly focused on community-expert-non-experts, who understand and build knowledge and ‘data’ over time relating to the environment surrounding them.