When Rose McAdoo visits a glacier, she doesn’t just bring a harness, rope and crampons. She brings a portable camp stove, sugar, powdered whole milk and heavy cream, and a gelatin substitute called agar. The glacier will also become an ingredient.
McAdoo is a dessert artist, and one of her favorite desserts to make on, and with, a glacier is panna cotta. First, she mixes glacial runoff with her ingredients, then brings the mixture to a boil before letting it cool and adding spirulina — a blue algae powder — to achieve various shades of blue. The surrounding snow acts as McAdoo’s refrigerator, where the mixture sets in molds for up to two days.
Once it’s ready, McAdoo whips egg whites, sugar and cream of tartar by hand into a stiff meringue and coats the top of the layers of set panna cotta. Tart blackberries, black currants and chocolate form a base that resembles a moraine, the soil and rock left behind by a moving glacier. When she’s finished, three layers of custard — white at the top, lighter blue in the middle and darkest blue on the bottom — illustrate how glaciers compress under their own weight, becoming denser and bluer. Finally, to signify climate change, McAdoo torches the meringue.
McAdoo, who splits her time between Alaska and Antarctica, is one of several artists who create art on and about the West’s glaciers. The World Glacier Monitoring Service estimates that around 9 trillion tons of glacier ice have melted since 1975 — an astonishing loss that gives the artists a sense of urgency. “As an artist, it feels like our art has the potential to tell really important stories, but those stories have to be told right now,” McAdoo said.
Creating glacier-inspired art is not a studio-bound practice: These artists do at least some of their work on or near the ice, surrounded by the reverberating thunder of ice calving and the babble of runoff — natural activities, but also signs of rapid melting.
Credit: Rachel Heckerman
Emma Mary Murray, who lives on an island in Maine, sews with fabric, needles and thread. Oakland, California, multidisciplinary artist Caroline Landau gravitates toward glass. Bellingham, Washington, artist Jill Pelto uses watercolor. And McAdoo, of course, prefers sugar.
“As an artist, it feels like our art has the potential to tell really important stories, but those stories have to be told right now.”
All grapple with similar challenges: capturing a moment in time with a glacier that is both living and dying before them.
All the landscapes Murray embroiders are in flux, she said. Even though mountains don’t melt away like glaciers, the light or clouds above them shift. A new development might block the view. But Murray’s glacier-inspired work matters more than other subjects, she said, “because we can act, and we need to act.”
Every year, scientists with the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project go deep into the mountains to measure the boundaries and size of glaciers, among other data points. In 2024, Murray joined directors Mauri Pelto and his daughter, Jill, on an expedition.
Murray brought a small art supply tote filled with needles, thread, yarn, white canvas, denim scraps and paint. On the glaciers, she sat on her backpack and all her extra layers to stay warm and dry, then began to stitch.
After 10 days, she left the expedition with a series of white flags depicting the six glaciers she visited. The sixth, Ice Worm, has shrunk so much it is no longer considered a glacier. According to the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project, all 47 monitored glaciers in the North Cascades are retreating, while four, including Ice Worm, have disappeared.
All of Murray’s flags show glacial details in painstaking stitches. Many include a stitched black line crossing white space, denoting the glaciers’ previous boundaries. Individually, each flag is a tribute to the glacier it depicts, but strung together — which is how she displayed the work for an art show and on social media — the flags are “symbolic to me of both the sorrow and everything we cannot change, in a white-flag-of-surrender way,” Murray said. “And representative of a hope, a prayer, a wish for unity and climate action.”
Her art grapples with the loss that has already occurred, and with humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, and its consequences.
Last September, Caroline Landau recruited scientist Madison Sankovitz, photographer Oliver Rye, several friends and a mule to hike their supplies into the Palisade Glacier, the continent’s southernmost glacier. The central Sierra Nevada trek is arduous, over 16 rugged miles with 4,750 feet of elevation gain. The crew hauled several pounds of wax for mold-making, plus multiple stoves to melt the wax. “Everybody takes in information in different ways, and so to add art to that conversation and help people take in information is my way of communication,” Landau said.
Landau makes molds of ice chunks in the field, painting melted wax on fragments of ice, encasing them and carrying out the pumpkin-sized hunks, carefully keeping them from becoming too hot or too cold. If one is dropped, it could shatter.
“Everybody takes in information in different ways, and so to add art to that conversation and help people take in information is my way of communication.”
Back in their studio, Landau uses plaster and silicone goo to make positive and negative space molds, creating detailed containers to blow clear glass into. The Palisade sculptures resemble translucent tinfoil, intricately crimped and folded. Glass sculptures inspired by icy hunks from Newfoundland capture and refract the light, giving off a soft glow. In the face of the ongoing climate crisis, “the goal of this project is to really show its liquid loss and the transformation of melt,” Landau said.
Jill Pelto, who has visited Washington’s glaciers since she was a teenager assisting her father’s fieldwork, earned a master’s degree in science focusing on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Now, she communicates science through her paintings, playing with color, pattern and form to “show the dimensionality of glaciers and water.”
Her light, airy watercolors show layers and movement, created by dipping the tip of her paintbrush into nearby meltwater. Pelto said she’s drawn to the magic of glaciers, regardless of their fate. Her recent paintings focus on moving beyond loss alone to show how glaciers fit into a bigger context: feeding river ecosystems and eventually, the ocean.
Glacial art feeds the soul and the stomach. McAdoo sometimes serves her desserts on or near the glacier they came from, a sweet, spirited treat for the researchers, mountaineers and guides she works alongside. “I think that’s one of the powerful parts of dessert and cake,” she said. “It’s inherently celebratory.”
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This article appeared in the June 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Inspired by ice.”
