Iceblink

Iceblink is an artist’s book that responds to archival materials documenting Marie Peary Stafford’s 1932 voyage to Greenland to oversee the construction of a monument to her father, explorer Robert Peary. Through this project, I investigate the entanglements of U.S. colonial imagination, whiteness, and knowledge production—alongside my own relationship to these systems as an artist, teacher, and white woman.
The work began in university archives, where I encountered Stafford’s journals and photographs. I was drawn to how her presence, like mine, was shaped by institutional systems of race, gender, and power. Making this book became a way to name and begin to fracture the colonial gaze I carry—one that has unconsciously shaped how I move through art and academia.
“Iceblink” refers to a phenomenon in which white light reflects off distant ice and glows beneath the clouds—a ghostly, indirect signal of what’s ahead. The term became a metaphor for my experience of reading Stafford’s writing: trying to see through the haze of whiteness, both hers and my own.
The book’s layered pages combine interpretations of Stafford’s photographs with stenciled silhouettes based on objects she packed for the trip. These overlays obscure and reframe the landscapes, echoing how material culture mediates perception and memory. As I worked, I reflected on my own travels and how I have seen unfamiliar places through personal and cultural filters.
This project was made in close collaboration with poets, curators, and printers whose insights shaped its form. Through shared dialogue and making, Iceblink became not only a study of colonial vision—but also a tool for turning that gaze back on myself.