Robin: Marguerite, I feel like your work is often very dense and layered, with, you know text and imagery, with a beautiful sculptural element. I think of your work as a stage.

We share the medium of photography. But I work with in a sculptural way backwards, because almost always I am creating work to be photographed, and then it's often photographed in situ which might be at the lake, or it might be on in my backyard on a barbecue resembling a watershed that's made itself.

So we share sculptural interests, and we also both share a deep commitment to research. I always count on Marguerite for some of the science.

I wasn't sure what approach I would take, because I didn't want to repeat the approach I took in Oklahoma and with our other works. I believe it was Marguerite that said, “You know, there are shipwrecks at the bottom of Lake Champlain,” and we both went—boom!

They’ve existed at the bottom of the lake from the Industrial Revolution to the present. And it's really interesting to both of us, because this demarcates the time where humans have had such a marked change on the weather and the environment. So the bottom of the lake becomes like a librarian's archive of that shift.

Marguerite and I have often worked with climate change in relationship to water and or health. We also have worked on other projects. But climate change is always there.

About six years ago I started, in a very small way, casting ships of ice. But I wasn't pigmenting them yet, and they weren't creating their own watersheds. I think most of us think of melting glaciers as some kind of metaphor, or certainly they’re the most visible barometer of climate change, and I thought, you know, we're gonna go from the macro to the micro in my case with these ships. Having them melt, to me, was sorrow—the weeping, the loss, the memorializing of our history and our and our current state of being.

I photograph them as they're melting. The films are really like moving still images, for the most part, because I'm a photographer at heart. And then I let them dry. I went out the next day, and I noticed things, and I thought, wow, they're drying and cracking in the shape of a river or a lake. And then I would use that same platform, create more ships, melt them, and record as the ship weeps and shape-shifts from barge to waterway or land way.

It not only creates its own watershed, but many of the students and people who came to the show kept referring to my particular pieces on the wall as paintings. And I quickly said, “No, no, they're not paintings.” But then I began to think, oh, yes, they are paintings. I just didn't paint them.

I'm always interested in how things connect. And I wanted to think about how I might connect environmental issues and climate change with social and environmental justice. With David Fadden’s input, I was able to bring in the element of environmental racism. He talked about growing up along a different river than the lake, and the things he experienced along that river. In one of the films, his is one of the voices you hear.

I have to thank Tonya, who initially introduced me to Jacqueline Madison, the president of the North Country Underground Railroad Museum, during the residency. I was very interested in how she talked about Lake Champlain as a gateway to freedom. Waterways as the sort of glory of migration. She said to me, “Robin, everything migrates, everything moves.”

Marguerite: What really interests me is this idea of change and how changes can be very quick. It could be slow. It can be disruptive. And right now we're in a very disruptive, quick-change era.

And so my works that are on display—all of them have an artificiality about them, even though they seem naturalistic. It's as if we are replacing nature with human detritus. People will get maybe drawn to the work because it does look beautiful. But then it's not what you think it is, and you have to kind of parse that out.

I think a lot about different geological eras and how they have been defined. Supposedly we're in the Anthropocene—a lot of people use that term, though it's never really been accepted by most scientists, because it's hard to accept it while it's still happening.

The environment is changing. We're changing. Political views are changing.  So what's the best way to adapt? And obviously the best way to adapt, whether you're talking about social justice or more scientific view of environment, is to recognize that we're all part of the system. We're all part of the larger whole.

And when you start disrupting that larger whole, you are also disrupting your own ability to persist and to thrive.

Robin: Can I ask you a question about what you said with that adaption? What do you feel that takes? I was just at the Hammer Museum yesterday, and this artist did a piece and she had all these architectural elements floating like our floating world. And why are they floating? Well, it turns out that most, if not all, of South Vietnam, in 25 years will be greatly affected by flooding if not completely inundated. And we're going to have 20 million people migrating.

Marguerite: I don't know if you can adapt to every situation. I made these two large prints, and I'm thinking that that's going to be a whole series about you know, being in suspension, remnants of human culture. I mean, I don't know if you can adapt to every situation.