ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice is nomadic, which is to say land-based, peripatetic and improvisational. I go to where forces alive in the land draw me, be they geologic, atmospheric and/or anthropic. On foot with a camera and notebook, I track whatever bewilders my attention: the extraordinary in the ordinary, variations minor and multiplying, things that unsettle and remake a place. I have learned much and have still much to learn from Indigenous ways of living on the land, of thinking with wind and water, of sensing and tracking myriad undercurrents of change. My challenge is to bring exploration and sensation into composition and to put readers/viewers at the intersection of exposure and perception, where they can feel themselves coming into a place for the first time with all senses firing.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Website https://diannechisholm.space/
A non-commercial site for exhibiting various compositions of travel writing and photography. The main page, "Arctic Circlings," is an evolving constellation of photo-galleries which features meditations on diverse circumpolar territories and circumstances. The folder "Winter Travels in East Greenland" ventures reflections on a season of living and traveling in the Ammassalik area. "Fall Travels in West Greenland" features serial photo essays on the ice-riddled habitats and environs of Ilulissat (under construction).
Miscellaneous Publications
My photos appear in Up Here Magazine, Greenland Today, Guide to Greenland, UAlberta North (promotional brochures), and as cover-images for Donia Mounsef, Plimsoll Lines: Poems (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2018), François Turcot, My Dinosaur: Poems (English translation, Book Thug, 2016), and Gail Scott, My Paris, A Novel (Mercury Press, 1999, p.7).
CREATIVE WRITING PUBLICATIONS
2026. The Waking Glacier, A High Arctic Lyric. A book of innovative poetic prose which chronicles a recent tall-ship journey around the Svalbard archipelago with reflections on a lifetime of critical encounters with glaciers. University of Alberta Press, Wayfarer Series. Forthcoming.
Selections from The Waking Glacier:
2025. “Walruses in Old Blubbertown”; “Farthest North." The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment and Culture in Canada 20.2. https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol20/iss2/10/
2025. “Dahlbreen Glacier”; “Farthest North” (rpt.); “Flotsam and Jetsam, Nordkappbukta”; “Isbjørn, Stubendorffbreen”; “What Remains.” Special issue “On the Cold Edge: Creative Meditations on Svalbard.” Eds. Hester Blum, Candace Jensen and Jacinda Russell. Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture 2.1. Forthcoming.
Travel Writing:
2018. “Arctic Circlings: A Nomadology.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 34. http://www.rhizomes.net/issue34/chisholm/intro.html
2009. “The Nomadic Experiment of a Steppe Land Flaneuse.” Special Issue on “Today’s Global Flaneuse." Ed. Kathryn Kramer. Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies. Vol. 7 (Fall/Winter): 1-25. https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/wagadu/vol7/iss1/3/
2005. “Climbing in Bolivia, Passages in a Landscape of Extremes.” Alberta Views: Social Issues, Politics, Culture (June): 42-43. https://www.academia.edu/3777057/Climbing_in_Bolivia_Passages_in_a_Landscape_of_Extremes
Memoir:
2005. “My Edmonton Haunts, or a Hauntology of Belonging.” Edmonton on Location: River City Chronicles. Ed. Heather Zwicker. Edmonton: NeWest Press. 1-10.
Guide to Greenland Travel Blog:
2018--. “Polar Bear Skin-Workers in Isortoq, East Greenland”; “Dog-Sledging Expedition from Diilerilaaq to Isortoq, East Greenland”; "Seal-hunting One Brilliant Day in East Greenland" [photo-chronicles.] https://guidetogreenland.com/author/Dianne-chisholm/ . (Guide to Greenland is a local commercial initiative to promote travel and tourism across Greenland.)
EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES
2024. "From the Cold Edge: Creative Meditations on Svalbard & the Arctic Circle Residency." An exhibition of diverse artwork by twenty-three resident artists, including several of my photos and a poetry broadside. Amos Eno Gallery, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY. Oct 11- Nov 3.
2022. "Distance as a Keeping," a Zoom presentation of my photo-poetics, organized by poet-in-residence Margaret Christakos and hosted by Green College, UBC (for my half of this encounter go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8VKecsn3Tw or see below.
2019. “Arctic Circlings.” Screening/Reading, with Q&A. For the Institute of Environmental Sustainability, Mount Royal University, Calgary, February 25.
2017. "Arctic Circlings." Screening/Reading, with Q&A. For the Canadian Mountain Network 2017 Mountain Festival, December 8, University of Alberta, Edmonton.
RESIDENCIES AND WORKSHOPS
2025. Banff Centre Mountain Writers Intensive. October 29th-November 18th, Banff, Alberta. A three-week residency for eight writers working, in any genre, on mountain narratives, environmental journalism, stories of adventure or projects with an environmental theme. Forthcoming.
2024. Arctic Culture Lab Greenland Residency. August 15th-October 15th, Ilulissat, Avannaata. Based in Ilulissat, the Arctic Culture Lab artist in residence program facilitates meetings between artists and local knowledge holders. https://www.arcticculturelab.no/
2022. The Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency, October 1st-18th. The Arctic Circle Residency brings together international artists of all disciplines, scientists and educators who collectively explore the Svalbard Archipelago and Arctic Ocean aboard a specially outfitted Barquentine sailing vessel. http://thearcticcircle.org/
CREATIVE WORK-IN-PROGRESS
“Sermilik: Passages from East Greenland.” A collection of prose poems featuring life lived amidst the ice fjords and small settlements of southeast Greenland. Illustrated with drawings and photographic images.
“Arctic Circlings.” An assemblage of peripatetic, photo-poetic musings. Ongoing and evolving, “Arctic Circlings” exists in various forms: as a journal article (see above), as a performance piece, and as the main page of my photography website (https://diannechisholm.space/ ).
"Torch." An elegy for Florence Marie Hoff (aka Judy Connolly), the long-absent birth-mother I recently discovered a year after her death, Torch experiments with a lyrical mix of memoir, moirologia and quest-narrative to compose an emerging feeling of untimely intimacy while haunting Florence's reputed gift for torch-singing.
PROFESSIONAL ASSIGNMENTS
2020. Coastal Labrador, West Greenland and the Northwest Passage. Arctic Cultural Studies Presenter/Public Intellectual. One Ocean Expeditions. August - September (cancelled due to the Covid 19 Pandemic and other complications).
2016. South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula. Guest Photography Coach and Expedition Staff Member for Polar Latitudes, MS Hebridean Sky. November 7-30.