Splitting, Calving, Melting was produced through a direct and elemental gesture: artist Hannah Rowan placed ice onto the scanning bed of a Risograph printer, capturing the material in its transient state as it dissolved.

The resulting image records a moment of transformation: a substance shifting from solidity to liquidity in real time. By allowing the ice to imprint itself through melting and movement, Rowan collapses geological process into mechanical reproduction. The print becomes both document and event.

The title references glacial fragmentation and thaw, processes that unfold over vast temporal scales. Here, those phenomena are condensed into a single surface. The scanner’s glass bed becomes a site of compression where deep time meets technological immediacy.

This method reflects Hannah Rowan’s wider artistic practice, in which she constructs interconnected systems that speculate on the origins and shifting states of water. Fluidity, ephemerality and geology are not abstract themes but active forces. Through the Risograph process, these otherwise fleeting conditions are stabilised — transformed into a tangible object while retaining traces of instability.

Produced in a limited edition of 100, Splitting, Calving, Melting captures a moment where matter, time and technology intersect.

Learn more about artist Hannah Rowan