SPRING: The Matanuska Project, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska, 2011

Dress, hand-dyed and silk-screened silk

Limited edition collection of photographs on 100% cotton archival paper

This project began in 2010 when Amy Johnson, bewitched by the glacier blue waters of Alaska, went back home to Seattle and began hand-dyeing and printing on silk fabric in an attempt to capture and remember a geological essence. A year later, still transfixed by the glacial blue waters, she transformed the silk into a full blown gown and drove back to Alaska. After two months of camping near a valley glacier four miles wide by 27 miles long, this performance by the artist was born. These photographs are markers of that moment revealing a time of change and growth and new beginnings after which Johnson packed up her things and migrated north to Alaska for what would be nearly a decade. She did not know at the time that this work would become the first in a series of four — this one she would call “Spring.” Nor was she aware that this work would evolve to represent another new beginning — The shocking, breathtaking, unwelcomed and harrowing spring of the Anthropocene — the global glacier melt.