ERRATIC
2017-2023
An erratic is a rock that has been transported by a glacier and then expelled once the glacier has melted. An erratic signifies the time and place where the glacier originated - often hundreds of miles and thousands of years distant. As a book, online publication, and gallery installation, Erratic is an existential exploration into what is being carried within the self and what a life leaves behind.
WORKING GROUP
BOOK
INSTALLATION
publication
RESEARCH SUPPORTED BY RESIDENCIES:
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Wrangell Mountain Center, McCarthy, AK
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Anchorage Museum, AK
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The Island Institute, Sitka, AK
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The Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture, Dawson City, BC, Canada
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Center for Culture, History, and the Environment, University of Madison, WI
Erratics Working Group
ERRATICS is a collaborative curatorial project exploring empathy and geologic forces.
Glaciers by definition move; they are bodies of ice that change landscapes, sculpting valleys and carving mountains. Even as they have become the global measure of climate change, few things equal the transformative force of a glacier. Erratics is a working group that takes these metaphors as our principles; we have come together to gather diverse forms of knowledge and creative production, to coalesce various energies into a powerful collaborative dynamic. We carry with us pieces from science, visual art, performance, scholarship, traditional knowledge, feminism, and climate communication, like a glacier picks up boulders and pebbles. We acknowledge the vast multiplicity of artists, poets, dancers, and scientists who are orbiting around geologic subject matter – and from this constellation, we seek to curate an interdisciplinary response. Erratics is Hannah Perrine Mode, Nina Elder, and Tyler Rai. LEARN MORE.
ERRATIC
This book is comprised of photos and drawings of dynamic landscapes and erratics encountered over several years of travel research. The visual components are matched with excerpts from journals, letters, sketchbooks, and notes.
Practice Space
CamBridge, MA
Practice Space is a research studio that focuses on questions that reach across disciplines. Asked “What is the Idea of North,” Nina created an on-site installation focused on glacial material that combined scientific and poetic responses.
EDGE EFFECTS
Edge Effects is a digital magazine produced by graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), a research center within the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. As a visiting artist at CHE, Nina was able to create the first iteration of Erratic in 2017.
