“Arctic Circlings” (2010 - ) is an assemblage of photographic travel meditations (photo prose poems). My method is to select photos for a form of spontaneous reflection that folds writing into seeing in an accruing composition. Instead of representing the Arctic in photographs and accounts of places already traveled and known, I frame photography with poetic commentary to induce an arctic to emerge in the process of viewing and reading. Readers might orient themselves less by plot or map than by nomadic lines of flight that are ever circling around an arctic of evolving concepts and sensations.
This project exists in various forms: as the main page of my photo website https://diannechisholm.space; a journal article "Arctic Circlings: A Nomadology," Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 34 (2018) http://rhizomes.net/issue34/chisholm/intro.html; and a traveling slideshow/poetry reading, first hosted by the Canadian Mountaineering Network at the University of Alberta, Dec 8, 2017.
For a full introduction to this project, "Artic Circlings: A Nomadology," see: https://diannechisholm.space/dianne-chisholm-artist-statement.