The Gund’s current exhibition, Something Blue, takes viewers far from the tiny bubble of Knox County and places them amongst momentous ice sheets and glaciers. Viewers are invited to consider concepts of scale, impermanence, and time from both human and geological frameworks. This exhibition also marks a new form of collaboration between The Gund and scientific researchers from Kenyon.

Something Blue is presented alongside Dust: Jumpstarting Life on Earth’s Coldest, Driest Continent, a science research exhibition showcased in the Bulmash Exhibition Hall in Chalmers Library, curated by Dr. Ruth Heindel, Kenyon’s Dorothy & Thomas Jegla Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, and her colleagues Anna Bergstrom (Boise State University), Jason Cervenec (Ohio State University), and student researchers William Bryant (Kenyon ’25), and Jordan Schisler (Kenyon ’25).

The idea for this collaboration originated in June of 2021 when Heindel was brainstorming ways that her research in Antarctica could be shared with a broader audience encompassing non-scientists, students, and community members. She submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation that detailed her plans to research mineral weathering in snow banks and supraglacial ice in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica with researchers and students from Boise State and Ohio State, and later translate this research into an educational exhibition. This exhibition will be shown at Boise State, and then Ohio State following its presentation at Kenyon.

Heindel was inspired by the observations that she and her team recorded when they scanned microscope images. “The main thing that we think about when looking at these images is just how beautiful they are, and how they look like art to us,” Heindel said. She reached out to The Gund about an opportunity to involve artists in the conversation, which led to this collaboration.

The Bulmash's Dust exhibition features five cases. Arrows on the ground lead visitors from one case to the next, presenting them with scientific information in a narrative format. The narrative begins in the fields of Antarctica—showcasing snow boots, notebook entries, and a piece from the tent Heindel stayed in—and moves to examples of the petri dishes of dust samples and photos of students working in the labs at Kenyon, Boise State, and Ohio State. “What we try to communicate about science is that it's not just about ‘here is this fact or this knowledge’, it's so much more about the process,” Heindel said. Emphasizing the importance of observation, inquiry, and experimentation in Heindel’s glacial research process was vital when working out how to connect the science exhibition with contemporary art.

Manami Ishimura, assistant professor of studio art at Kenyon and the artist behind Star Harvest, featured in Something Blue, spoke to this connection: “I am trying to use my curiosity, and science is the same thing: to find what you don’t know all the time.” Star Harvest was inspired by a site-specific work Ishimura did in Höfn, Iceland at Diamond Beach in January of 2023. She traveled back to Diamond Beach this past November after being commissioned by The Gund to re-invent this piece for Something Blue. Under this new lens, she collected ice pieces and fitted them into brass cages. She documented their melting process and experimented with additions of plaster and metal stands. Ishimura's process of measuring the ice with the cages and pins, reminiscent of a pointing machine—a device sculptors use to measure an object for replication—mirrored Heindel’s intricate process of measuring and experimentation carried out in the McMurdo Dry Valleys and later in the lab. “There are a lot of parallels between [Ishimura’s] process, and our process, and how we approach things,” Heindel said. “Those connections have been really unexpected for me.”

Other pieces in Something Blue that draw on the idea of scientific process as a gateway to artistic expression include 88 cores by Peggy Weil, and Grounding Lines (Doomsday) by Claire Greenshaw. 88 cores is a video installation that tracks the length of 88 sections of ice from a Greenland Ice Sheet that scientists research. The video is four and a half hours long and tracks ice dating over 110,000 years old, a scale and pace meant to highlight the significance of geologic time and the gravity of climate change. Grounding Lines (Doomsday), by Claire Greenshaw, similarly places scale at the forefront of her work. It is a site-specific piece drawn directly onto the gallery wall with graphite pencil. Approaching the wall from a distance is daunting and even thrilling. The looming glacier seems to govern the gallery space with its sheer surface area. Greenshaw, in crafting her work on this scale, quite literally asks viewers, “how are we encountering the world?” Viewers are prompted to erase part of the drawing with provided materials; thus, the image is in a state of constant revision, and ultimately, disappearance. As viewers come closer, the smudges and marks of erasures from past visitors are revealed.

This experience echoes the manner in which many individuals interact with the impending crisis of climate change: our proximity to the problem often dictates our understanding of the role we play in its acceleration. Greenshaw hopes that as our physical imprint on the glacier becomes recognizable, our place in the equation of climate change will, too. “If people can find some perspective and get some kind of foothold on their own sense of participation and agency, then maybe that can translate into collective power and change,” Greenshaw said.

The collection of 18 works shown in Something Blue, and the five exhibition cases in Dust, both work toward this goal, using respective languages of science and art to illuminate environmental occurrences and provide viewers with a space to ponder their relationship to them. “Having a moment to pause and observe through the time that the artist spent, and see what is going on through this work can allow us to share empathy, and that is a good start,” Ishimura said. Greenshaw voiced a similar hope: “I think about the surface of the drawing as a kind of a residue of my labor,” she said, going on to ask how that evidence can cause viewers to evaluate their participation, making her work "a space to reckon with impermanence and change.”

For the artists and scientists involved in both exhibitions, this exchange of perspective has revealed surprises unachievable without the union of science and art that Something Blue and Dust initiated. The involvement from Kenyon artists and researchers on both exhibitions has been particularly exciting for Kenyon students and Knox County residents who have used this connection to relate to the work more closely. By bringing distant parts of the world to Knox County, awareness of environmental issues related to ice has taken root: a pivotal feat of Something Blue and Dust: Jumpstarting Life on Earth’s Coldest, Driest Continent.