An interpretive essay on Tara Nicholson’s exhibition, Mammoths, EcoZombies and Permafrost Extinction written by Caolan Leander

"What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals"

- Ocean Vuong

Installation view of *Mammoths, EcoZombies and Permafrost Extinction* in the Main Gallery, 2025.

The Arctic exists in a peripheral space shaped by stories. Caspar David Friedrich’s 1824 painting Das Eismeer depicts it as an inhospitable expanse of sharp edges and unforgiving angles. Nearly one hundred years later, Herbert Ponting’s Barne Glacier captures a colossal icecap towering over a sledder, suggesting a masculine triumph over an unyielding landscape. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein portrays the Arctic through the eyes of white male explorers, who interpret it as an infinite expanse of terror-inducing extremes. The perceived hostility of the land is embodied through the monster, othering the terrain through an allegorical assemblage of the human and the non-human. Rooted in the Gothic Sublime, these narratives imply heroic feats of European conquest amidst an unrelenting wilderness. Renderings of the North as an untamed hinterland made it consumable through a white tourist gaze, centering a European perspective while obliterating others. These stories fueled an interest in imperial expansion into the polar regions, fanning the cultural imaginary of an untapped territory.

In Tara Nicholson’s Mammoths, EcoZombies, and Permafrost Extinction, the Arctic is seen through large-scale photographs that reveal the North in a state of crisis. Trading the frozen vistas of icebergs for intimate photographs of animal parts, riverbanks, and ice cores, her images invoke an existential uncanniness that destabilizes the viewer as we witness multiple absences through the temporary presence of decay, erosion, and thawing ice. This focus on more-than-human remains decenters typical narratives of Arctic spectacle by using strategies taken from the Gothic. Body parts conjure horror narratives and speculative encounters that crack open doors into the past.

Detail of *Woolly Mammoth Molar,* photographic print. Main Gallery 2025.

During her field research in the Arctic, Tara documented specimens from the Permafrost Institute and the Yukon Palaeontology Collection. A close-up shot reveals a lynx skull with a mouthful of teeth beside excavated puma bones. Sharing a time-space, the afterlives of these animals speak to an ongoing loss of relations. As ecological engineers, their lives (and deaths) interweave with human and more-than-human livelihoods. One story of disappearance becomes the prelude for another. Navigating such narratives of loss, we notice ghosts. We hold space for the stories of the dead because their stories belong to all of us.

As a warming climate alters the migrations of animals—dislocating them from their homelands—it reshapes landscapes and ways of living. Melting ice dispossesses Indigenous Arctic communities whose lives depend upon it, creating multispecies crises of displacement where the colonial encounter remains a haunting force. With nations vying for control of the North, entire habitats vanish with few witnesses, though these “unseen” spaces are still accessible to extractive industries[1]. The spectres of the imperial project—the residues of mining, drilling, culling, razing—spill into atmospheres and change weather, mixing into global feedback loops that spread unevenly. With rising wildfire emissions and warming temperatures, the tundra releases more carbon than it can store, accelerating the process[2]. Time is unwoven through these events, altering our impressions of permanence and autonomy.

As the ice melts, it exposes valuable mammoth ivory. Canada’s ban on ivory excludes the tusks of mastodon and mammoth[3], and this unregulated market propels an international demand that reinforces the Arctic’s position as a highly-valuable region. Some miners accelerate the melting process by blasting the permafrost with high-pressure hoses, polluting ecosystems and waterways to expose “ice ivory”[4]. In Mammoths, EcoZombies and Permafrost Extinction, the rising value of frozen spaces as they vanish is put into a different focus. In the lightbox images, ice cores are displayed in a glamour studio set-up, activating imaginings of high-end auctions or luxury jewelry displays. This playful nod to the value of ice as capital is complicated by a greater value—the environmental data found within the core. Ice cores hold vital information about prehistoric geological patterns, revealing insights into the planet’s cycles[5]. Without this knowledge, another tether of shared history snaps.

In the photographs, the afterlives of the undead linger. The only animated bodies belong to a crew of palaeontologists, but they are concealed by their work, facing away from us. Digging in the darkened soil of a riverbank, they seem hurried, salvaging stories from below the water line. An accompanying sketch of rising water levels affirms their urgency. Gazing into the sediment of an eroding slope, one wonders about the storied lineage of strata. Whose perspectives are prioritized when the river crests and these Pleistocene timelines disappear?

In images taken from the archive, eerie compositions of antlers, femurs, and metatarsals invoke spectral landscapes amidst an industrialized setting. The scythed branches of caribou antlers—stored in bins—transform into ghost forests with knotted roots. On another glance, they shapeshift into bleached coral reefs, surrounded by polyurethane. Landscapes of ruination are summoned through the arrangement of bones, signalling the interdependence of our ecosystems. Photography has long linked arms with conservation, but in the age of mass extinction, it has the dual role of certifying presence while also acting as an archive of the dead[6].

In the essay “Why look at animals?”, John Berger traces how modern animal species vanish from everyday life only to return as images, where they become a “monument to their own disappearance”[7]. Observing a close-up of a fossilized mammoth molar, we travel its trajectories, pondering its lifecycle. Fissured with timelines, the tooth becomes a map of converging paths and perspectives. In another photo, a rack of mammoth ribs is laddered on a wall. The film’s grain mimics the ossification of bone, and this mineralized effect layers the photograph with a clinical aesthetic. This composition of an archival space—a place of preservation filled with decay—speaks to the duality of presence/absence found throughout the exhibition. An installation of ceramic tusks, mounted on shelves to resemble a palaeontology archive, furthers this feeling. The simulation of an archive within the gallery (a distant relative) blurs the boundaries between them. The tusks, made from pit-fired porcelain, conjure ghosts through a sort of doubling. They initiate affective atmospheres that summon some stories while obscuring others.

Gazing at a wall of mammoth bones, our centre is recalibrated.

Detail of *600 Tusks,* hand-built, pit fired porcelain tusks. Main Gallery 2025.

In labs around the world, bioengineers race against time to resurrect extinct species like the wooly mammoth. Firms like Colossal have amassed $435 trillion in investments since 2021[8], framing the de-extinction project as a conservation effort to prevent permafrost thaw and biodiversity loss. One wonders how much time, and how many mammoths, it would take to incite tangible change in the fastest warming region on Earth. With the landscape of these undead animals so vastly changed, what becomes of their ancestral instincts? Will their impulses and agency remain their own or belong to their designers?

The desire to bring the dead back to life feels dangerously aligned with the impulse to wipe out the living. Both speak of dominion and an urge to hold power over a greater force in order to eclipse it. In Frankenstein, Victor’s thirst for godliness, framed in the pursuit of transcending science, leads to the creation of the monster and his own undoing. In the contemporary sphere of bioengineering—a world of artificial wombs, cross-species genome sequencing, and designer DNA—the speculative nature of de-extinction becomes the mammoth in the room. The activating question of the speculative genre—what if—spirals into a multiplicity of possibilities and futures. What if the mammoth’s return restores the permafrost by destabilizing another aspect of a fragile ecosystem? What if the reappearance of one species threatens the survival of others?

Living through a global extinction invites conversations with the un/dead. It is a slow haunting—an absence that ripples across time and space. The helix of interplanetary life flattens as species vanish from their timelines. In Mammoths, EcoZombies & Permafrost Extinction, the frozen crises of the Arctic are documented through an intersection of cultural, institutional, and embodied lenses. The hybridity of the archive-gallery distorts the separation between scientific and artistic inquiry by reframing the viewer’s gaze through more-than-human stories. These works bridge activism and the speculative to explore the potential of storytelling and its role in shaping perceptions of the cultural memory. Despite the exhibition’s localization of the Arctic, this is a planetary story told in many parts, with intersecting points of entry and innumerable points of view. No matter where we look, there is a sense of urgency. There is grief and anguish, but also hope and wonder. Reflecting upon this nexus, we link arms with ghosts. What hi/stories emerge from these unearthed sites of encounter? Whose futures fade away? What is released, and what can be salvaged?

Caolan Leander holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and a BA in Creative Writing and Art History from Concordia University. He currently lives on the stolen lands and waters of the Kanien'kehá:ka Nation in Tiohtià:ke.

Notes

Lisa E. Bloom, Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), 134.
Xingru Zhu, Gensuo Jia, and Xiyan Xu. “Accelerated rise in wildfire carbon emissions from Arctic continuous permafrost”, Science Bulletin 69, no. 15 (2024): 2430-32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scib.2024.05.022.
“Canada Implements Stricter Measures for Elephant Ivory and Rhinoceros Horn Trade,” Government of Canada, accessed February 1, 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/2023/11/canada-implements-stricter-measures-for-elephant-ivory-and-rhinoceros-horn-trade.html
Cox, Caroline, and Luke Hauser. “Ice Ivory to White Gold: Links Between the Illegal Ivory Trade and the Trade in Geocultural Artifacts,” Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy 26, no. 1 (2023), 25–40. doi:10.1080/13880292.2023.2217615.
Osman, M.B., Tierney, J.E., Zhu, J. “Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum.” Nature 599 (2021), 239–244. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03984-4
Adams, William M, Shane McCorristine, Adam Searle. “Conjuring up Ghost Species” in Extinction and Memorial Culture (Routledge, 2023), 142.
Berger, “Why Look At Animals?” in About Looking, (Pantheon, 1980), 24.
Bloom, David. “Colossal Raises $200 Million From Dodger Co-Owner, Hollywood Mega-Producer”, Forbes, January 16, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2025/01/16/colossal-biosciences-raises-200-million-for-de-extinction-efforts/

future histories of salvaging the dead // Caolan Leander

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