Meghann Riepenhoff’s new book collects cyanotypes made by ice

“Atkins was practically erased from historical past a number of instances, principally as a result of she was a girl,” says Riepenhoff. “For me, her legacy is one among originality, of pursuing a imaginative and prescient with rigour, persistence and care.” Certainly, these are very phrases which come to thoughts when perusing Ice, Riepenhoff’s immaculately conceived title with Radius Books. A big object with a blind debossed cowl bearing frosted imprints, it incorporates distinctive cyanotypes made in freezing landscapes between 2018 and 2021. The crisp printing exhibits off Riepenhoff’s icy brilliance, flaunting fantastical, near-hallucinatory varieties, shapes and colors. But the book additionally affords a way of tranquillity inside our internet-based picture tradition aquake with shareability and artificialness.

“I consider my work as a catalyst for connection. It is a chance to visualise and think about how direct, important and innate our relationship to our surroundings is. We are our surroundings.”

“Water, wind, pH, temperature, humidity – all of those elements present up within the formation of the crystals,” explains Riepenhoff. “On a microscopic degree, water is responding to situations, and organising molecules in a means that displays the inner order of water. Ice crystals type in response to what the water encounters – a pebble, a grain of sand and so on.” Riepenhoff’s prints are of the second and the environmental situations they had been made in, producing patterns that are the fingerprints of time and place.

“I consider my work as a catalyst for connection,” continues Riepenhoff. “It is a chance to visualise and think about how direct, important and innate our relationship to our surroundings is. We are our surroundings. The Ice work has made me take into consideration the monumental nature of glaciers, at all times shifting slowly, as if nonetheless. Just lately, we’ve seen their fast adjustments, and that has shifted my sense of time – seeing the acceleration of a geologic course of happen over human time.”

Riepenhoff’s prints are, too, efficiency items. Their photochemistry means they’re in a state of flux from the second of their conception. Though their reproductions in book type due to this fact inevitably restrict their inherent drama, the full-bleed printing evokes a way of fluidity inside the frozen.