Photographs captured outside Yellowknife, Northwest Territories — standing in the middle of frozen Prelude Lake at -40°C.
The pink is extraordinary. Most auroras are green — the sky's default, produced by oxygen excited at typical auroral altitudes and the colour visible on many clear nights at high latitudes. Pink appears because a powerful solar storm pushes auroral activity lower into the atmosphere, where nitrogen begins to fluoresce. On this night, nitrogen glows pink. It mixed with the green above it. The curtain's lower edge blushed. The whole display warmed.
It requires a large storm. It lasts minutes. Most people never see it in a lifetime.
Unlike a mountain range or a coastline, the aurora does not hold its shape between visits. It is landscape that refuses to be landscape — no fixed horizon, no stable ground, no contour that repeats. What it offers instead are valleys of light that open and close in seconds, ridgelines of colour that crest and dissolve before the eye can trace them. The sky becomes terrain. You learn to read it the way a traveller learns to read unfamiliar country: not by memorizing landmarks, but by staying alert to what is moving.
On this rare night the pink and green move together with a softness that feels intentional, organic, alive — great billowing folds that open and gather across the northern night sky in shapes the body recognizes before the mind has words for them. The colours catch in the snow underfoot. The light comes from everywhere and the darkness presses close, and you are enclosed in it — a figure inside a globe, the whole world reduced to this circle of snow and colour and cold.
To stand beneath it is to stand inside a landscape with no walls and no floor, one that is simultaneously above you and all around you, pressing into peripheral vision, shifting behind you while you turn toward it. Photographers who work in the north speak of losing their sense of scale — not because the aurora is simply large, but because it relocates the horizon. The ground beneath your feet becomes secondary. The real country is overhead.
These images ask nothing of the viewer except presence, as one does when witnessing in real life — the willingness to stand before something vast and receive what it offers on these rare and electric nights. Feminine, abstract, overwhelming in their delicacy. The infinite rendered intimate. A landscape that cannot be mapped, only witnessed. Moments of amazement, held still.
FLOW 1-12
Edition of 3 - 60in x 45in
Edition of 5 - 36in x 27in
Edition of 3 - 60in x 45in
Edition of 5 - 36in x 27in
FLOWS
Edition of 3 - 72in x 48in
Edition of 5 - 36in x 24in
Edition of 3 - 72in x 48in
Edition of 5 - 36in x 24in
