Thoreau’s Sink (sanctum sanctorum)

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in

the impervious and quaking swamps.” – Henry David Thoreau

Precariously perched on a low wooden walkway, I hear the sound of hundreds of toads calling. Scattered among the sphagnum moss, pitcher plants, and bog rosemary, they fearlessly copulate in broad daylight. Dozens tread water for as far as the eye can see while others hold onto the wood of the makeshift dock waiting to pair up. The entrails of one toad, likely the leftovers of a raptor’s meal, are strewn across an area heavily populated with leatherleaf. The air is thick with tiny flying insects who do not bite but remind me of how stagnant the air is here.

Crystal Bog is a peatland situated in northern Wisconsin. Peatlands, including bogs, fens, pocosins, and tropical peat swamp forests, make up just 3% of land on the planet but store twice as much carbon as all standing forests. These important landscapes mitigate climate change, stabilize the carbon cycle, and provide native habitat to several endangered species. But over the past several decades, humans have drained peatlands for a range of uses including agriculture, fuel, and development. By altering the hydrology and removing the vegetation, the balance in the peatland shifts from carbon sink to carbon source. The compressed organic matter begins to decay, releasing stored carbon as carbon dioxide, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

The durational work, Thoreau’s Sink, consists of sixty-six lumen prints arranged in a grid pattern. Made over the course of a week-long artist residency at Trout Lake Research Station, this piece documents the species present at Crystal Bog on unfixed photographic paper. These pastel, ephemeral illustrations of mosses, plants, and trees will fade over time. This time-based work is a quiet plea for the protection, conservation, and restoration of one of our most precious landscapes.