Jonathan Kay: Cold Listening

'Cold Listening' is an exhibition that contemplates the fragility of our landscapes through the surveying of Haupapa/Tasman glacier.

Kay  began exploring these glaciers as a way of making sense of the environments  in Aotearoa impacted by climate change. Over seven years and several visits, Kay has spent time on the glaciers, observed the lakes and icebergs  that carve off during melting, and followed the streams and rivers that  connect this water system. Through a range of photographic interventions  Cold Listening offers a deeper look at these vulnerable landscapes.

These works play with the conventions of landscape imagery — the intensely  coloured fabrics of the cyanotypes utilise an early cameraless photographic  technology to capture the physicality and chemistry of the ice and water.  The resulting works provide an uncanny index of the body of the glaciers,  capturing their mutable, slippery surfaces in a delightful demonstration  of the active transformations that characterise the glacial lifecycle.

While the black and white photographs and video work eschew the spectacular,  attempting instead to draw our attention more intimately to the forms, structures,  and details of glacial terrains. Tracing with his camera its transformations from  mountaintop to terminus (end of the glacier), Kay poetically documents the  glacier by both looking at and being in the environment. What emerges is a  dialogue, mediated by Kay’s photographic processes, between the body of the  artist and the body of the glacier; a dialogue that speaks of the inextricable yet  increasingly fragile connections between human and more-than-human worlds.

Cold Listening is presented with support from Massey University.