Nodin de Saillan & Sarah Crump: Polar Light

Biographical Note: Nodin de Saillan
When this project was made, Nodin was a PhD candidate in the Department of English and the Center for the Study of Origins at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work focuses on the environmental history of Great Britain and specifically the relationship between humans and wildlife as it has been shaped in legal, religious, and cultural contexts. By chronicling the history of wildlife regulation beginning in the fourteenth century, he is working to trace the development of human perceptions of animals based on the binary of useful and useless and how this perception has affected populations of specific animal species as well as modern Western society’s relationship to the natural world more generally.

Biographical Note: Sarah Crump
Sarah Crump, PhD candidate, Department of Geological Sciences and INSTAAR earned a BA at Carleton College. She is a paleoclimatologist situated at the intersection of the geosciences and biosciences. Her primary interests lie in developing records of past climate change and documenting the environmental effects of those changes, particularly in Arctic and alpine settings. She applies a variety of methods, including the analysis of ancient DNA and lipid biomarkers in lake sediment and cosmogenic radionuclide dating of glacial landforms, to better understand the glacial and ecological impacts of past climate variability. She is also committed to broadening participation within the geosciences and improving the communication of science outside the academic realm.

When Sarah Crump and Nodin de Saillan were earning their PhDs at the University of Colorado in Boulder they received a joint graduate fellowship from the Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts. “NEST seeks projects that engage with central questions of how methodologies within the sciences can inform artists and their approach to art making. In turn, what can contemporary art practice reveal about science to scientists? How can we use the practice of art to directly inform the practice of science, and vice versa? What central assumptions in scientific training might be challenged by approaches employed by the arts and humanities? Spearheaded by co-Investigators Erin Espelie (Assistant Professor, Film Studies Program and Department of Critical Media Practices) and Tara Knight(Associate Professor, Department of Critical Media Practices), and Jorge Perez-Gallego (Scholar in Residence, Department of Critical Media Practices) NEST is a cross-campus network of faculty, students, centers and campus units that combine artistic practice and scientific research that explores our common and disparate ways of observing, recording, experimenting and knowing.”

Their fellowship enabled them to create a graphical narrative of Holocene climate/environmental change in the Canadian Arctic, spliced with a future (RCP 8.5) T projection. Polar Light (Aqsarniit) 2018, was made with ink derived from lake sediments collected on Baffin Island, and watercolor. The series of five prints represents changes in Arctic climate and ecosystems during the last 10,000 years. It was made to provoke public curiosity and facilitate conversation about modern climate warming. Materials include document and prints.

• CAE1104: The Canary Project: Landscapes of Climate Change
• CAE1203: Smout Allen: 2011 Projects for Landscape Futures
• CAE1310: Bryndis Snæsborndöttir & Mark Wilson: Nanoq: Flat out and Bluesome
• CAE1404: Larry Mitchell: The 1° C Project
• CAE1504: Diane Burko: Polar Investigations
• CAE1602: Cape Farewell
• CAE1605: Anna McKee: 68,000 Years of Ice