EP 91 Pastries, science and baking in extreme environments with Rose McAdoo

I want to have a deeper impact i want my work to carry meaning i want my work to create larger conversations i care about these places i'm not just traveling to them once making art about them you know to become an influencer or something like they mean so much to me and i've spent so much of my life and time and energy and my practice right even just learning the skills that allow me to be in these spaces safely right crevasse rescue skills and wilderness medicine and risk management courses

like i've put in time to be in these spaces in a really intentional thoughtful way.

I've joined science teams in the field to learn what they're doing instead of just reading an article about how to measure glaciers and then making art about that. No, I want this to be from personal experience. I want to know what's happening. And so, yeah, I say all that because it's really important to me that my work holds more weight than just a picture on social That was Rose McAdoo.

She's a pastry chef and an artist. But it wasn't until recently that she started embracing the title of artist, because she had identified so strongly with being a pastry chef. She's been working in kitchens since she was 14, and then when she became a chef, she decorated wedding cakes in New York. It was a dream job, until it wasn't. She wanted more out of her work, an opportunity to make a difference. So six years ago, she took a job in Antarctica as a sous chef.

Today she splits her time between there and Alaska. Her surroundings and the scientists she worked around in Antarctica eventually inspired her to create something that could help share their science. That's when she began creating cakes that convey scientific ideas. She's traveled to and worked in some of the most extreme and remote environments in the world. Antarctica, a volcano summit in Kenya. Underground in the Australian outback. on a ship in Svalbard.

Rose says that nothing is controllable in these places and that the control lies in the planning she does before she goes into a given environment. She has to be flexible and able to pivot because the weather and the conditions could change at any minute. Given the seriousness of the environments she works in, she appreciates the levity of cake, how it allows people to let their guard down and be receptive to scientific ideas about issues like climate change.

However, she does struggle with the potential impact of what she's doing. She says she doesn't want to be seen as a little cake maker just posting on Instagram. She wants her work to carry meaning and to create larger conversations. So, here she is, Rose McAdoo.

Welcome to Chatter Marks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska and the Circumpolar North through the creative and critical thinking of ideas, past, present, and future. Music. Coming from a work environment, like a kitchen where so many things are controlled, what was it like for you to be baking in these wild places? Great question. It is completely, completely different.

There is almost no similarity between working in a kitchen and trying to make anything out in a rugged, you know, outdoor environment where you just have no control over anything. So, everything from the tools I use to the access to ingredients or how I respond if something's not going the way I planned, you know, all of that is different outside. So, it's been a wild ride to try and figure out how to minimize the chaos of my creative process.

And I will just say I haven't figured that out at all. So, I don't know if there is a way to figure it out. It just never, nothing ever resolves itself. It's, you just have to constantly pivot and constantly be flexible. So just a second ago, you mentioned tools and how they're different than the ones that you use in the kitchen. Could you take me through a little bit of that creative process with those tools? You know, maybe from the first time that you went to Antarctica spanning to now.

Yeah, that is, it's a big question. So I'll try and be concise. And I also want to say just a quick kind of caveat here too, is that my job in Antarctica is that I manage a NASA research camp. I started down there as a sous chef and I've now grown into this new role. But I'm hired on with the U.S. Antarctic Program. And so I'm a contracted employee down there. I am not down there to make art. I'm not down there to cook anymore at this point.

I'm not an artist. And so I just contractually with my position have to acknowledge that I am there for other purposes. And so any of the art that I make down there is on my own dime. I have to bring all my own resources because I can't use, you know, government ingredients or tools to make something for personal gain. And so there's kind of all these extra layers if I'm going to make things down in Antarctica.

And so the only time that I've really brought a huge selection of tools down there was in 2019, 2020, when I knew I was going to be spending a full year on the ice. I was planning to work for the summer and then stay for the winter. 12 months, four of those being in pitch black, ultra darkness, and still working outdoors the whole time. And I knew that at some point, I would lose it a little bit and need to return to my creative practice, you know, to kind of get back on track.

And so for that planning, I packed, we're allowed to bring 85 pounds of gear with us, clothing, fun stuff, kind of whatever we want. But 85 pounds is the limit. And so I used 65 of those pounds to bring down a bunch of fondant, a bunch of sculpting tools, clothing. I, I actually brought down four round hat boxes that's all stacked inside of each other that were ultra light, not styrofoam, because you are not allowed to bring styrofoam to Antarctica, which is great.

But I wanted something where I could make you know dummy cakes and still sculpt and still play creatively but to do that you know in a really light packable way and so I ended up bringing hat boxes down to put shortening and fondant on top of and kind of use that as a like a dummy cake. And I would say that process though is very different from when I'm preparing to go out to Denali Basecamp, for example, which I did June of 2023.

And for that, I'm making desserts that I want to share with an entire group of people. Everything has to be edible, which is what I want, obviously, but I'm not making dummy cakes at Basecamp. And so that planning process is much, much more intense. And I'll kind of tailor this answer to that experience. So I go through, once I've decided where I'm going to go, I read a lot about

that place. And I start looking at scientific data from that place and figure out what I'm the most curious about and what story I want to tell. At that point, I start designing desserts that communicate the science of that area in particular. I will design cakes that I want to create on site or a lot of desserts. And for the kind of backcountry field-based stuff, I end up doing a lot more desserts as opposed to cake because I can use a jet boil camp stove as my main

cooking tool. That's really what I rely on. And so once I have a menu decided and desserts kind of planned out, I go through and figure out what tools I need to make each of those things. And then I downsize all of those tools and go as bare minimum as I can. So I kind of make my dream list and then pare it way down. For the Denali project, actually, it was really exciting. I've always had this vision of putting all my pastry tools on a climbing harness.

And so I brought that to life with that project, which was really fun. And I brought a spatula, a mini spatula, a giant balloon whisk.

That's one thing you can't really downsize you need the volume in order to whip um and i brought a teeny tiny kind of a t uh i don't know we call that a good, oh a tea infuser ball that's what i used to be my strainer for all of my equipment so super tiny little sieve um a small knife and i just tied loops to these put carabiners on them and i had all my tools right there um as attachment points from and that's kind of the main hand tools that i use and then i also have two ultralight

stainless steel bowls as well as my jet boil stove set up. So a bunch of different fuel canisters, as well as like a foil bubble wrap insulator that I put around the fuel canister to keep it nice and warm. I also have a friend, an oil painter from Fairbanks named Clara Mache, and she made me this great little wooden platform with some blue foam on it just to keep my fuel up off of the snow.

And that helped keep the pressure of the canister and helped me allow for a more correct cooking time without burning through a bunch of fuel. And then I bring a one liter kind of canister attachment. And then also a, I want to say it's a two liter kind of ceramic pot that I have from Jetboil as well. And that's really my full setup. There's not much, you know, the ingredients are a separate thing, but tool wise, it's really two small bowls, two jet boil options.

And, um, I have like a teeny tiny little rag, an ultra light kind of bristle sponge for cleaning everything out. Um, I have a tiny thing of soap, but I usually end up just boiling out all my dishes, um, instead of using soap in the back country. Uh, yeah, so it's, it's tiny, it's a tiny setup, but you can do a lot with it. Yeah. I feel like it takes skill to be able to work with a limited amount of equipment. Whereas maybe someone like myself who is not a baker, I'm relatively new to cooking.

I need everything. I need all the pots. When I'm home, I have everything. It is ridiculous and it's great to have everything it's wonderful it's great to have more than you need in a food situation you know yeah and it's fun so it's just it's challenging to have less than that i'd typically like to be a maximalist in my cooking um and it you're right it's a good creative challenge to see what you can do with less yeah.

Often, I regret that challenge. I'm like, why am I doing this to myself? It's so hard. How much in those environments is controllable, and how much do you have to improvise or work around the environment? I would say nothing is controllable. Okay. If there is a control, I have yet to find it. The control is my planning before I go into the environment. And that's really the only thing I have full control over.

That being said, I have to be entirely flexible and able to pivot when I'm outdoors making these projects.

Um obviously the weather is a huge huge huge non-control i have no no idea what the weather is going to be other than you know estimates but um the weather can change on a dime pastry and desserts in general and are really really susceptible to any change in humidity cooking is really susceptible to changes in pressure um desserts are really temperamental if they get like a drop of water in them some things will you know break and not work again um okay so it's,

The weather is a huge, huge, huge part of that. But then also, in a kitchen, if something's not working out, you have all of the tools and ingredients you need to tweak it. You have the time and flexibility to start completely over if you need to. You can run to the grocery store and pick something up if you forgot it.

If I'm out in you know some remote place I don't have any of those luxuries and so if something's not working I have to decide what other recipe I'm going to pull an ingredient from I have to think about how that's going to affect the future recipe and whether I can spare that ingredient I don't bring a huge backup of you know extra ingredients and extra equipment with me because I can't physically can't bring all of that with me.

And so there's all this, you know, I think with risk management outdoors, right, if you're going to take one action, that's going to affect another action. And so you're always weighing all your options in extreme outdoor environments. And that's the same for my creative process as well. If I need to change something, I need to think about how it's going to affect the other projects I'm trying to work on. Um, yeah, there's just really not much you can control.

If something is not working, you have very limited options to, to change something. Yeah. I read that your art centers around human stories and the environment. What kinds of human stories do you feel like you're drawn to? Thank you for asking that question. That's very thoughtful. I am really drawn to stories where I think people aren't getting the recognition

that they deserve, or voices that we just don't hear as often. And so... I would say the two that have kind of taken up the most time and space in my practice have been incarcerated people, which I'll touch on briefly as it's not super relevant to this discussion. But incarcerated people and then climate scientists definitely are the two groups of people that I have been super drawn to. Incarcerated people because I have more personal history with that.

My dad was incarcerated for a period of time. And, you know, we don't have a relationship anymore as a result, which is fine. But I've always been really curious about people who spend time in prison or in jail and kind of what that looks like and what humanity comes out of those spaces. And so I look at that specifically through food, through desserts. And I've taught some two different workshops of storytelling through cake in prison. And that has been wildly fulfilling.

COVID hit right when I was kind of on the upward track with that project. And so I'm hoping to get that going again in the next year or so. And then the other part of that is kind of kicked in when I started going to Antarctica in 2018. And that's when I realized just the immense amount of work and passion that scientists put into their work and really saw a lot of parallels between artists and creative people.

And there's just a story that gets told and told and told and told and we don't even realize that we assume that that's the truth right but that artists are these creative you know left brain kind of woohoo go with the flow personalities and scientists are these really analytical technical right brain people um you know much more serious and i started working with scientists in And that's just not the case. Like, yes, they can tap into that and achieve these incredible, um.

You know, data research projects that need those skills, but they're also just goofy, silly people that are so obsessed with this work in the same way that artists are obsessed with, you know, painting or sculpting or whatever their art is. Scientists are so passionate about what they do and they're really playful in their work.

And I started realizing like, I don't know any climate scientists personally, and I'm someone who cares about climate and climate change um and that's just it seems so bizarre to me i feel like the people doing.

Work to help our planet you know they should be celebrities like their story their stories should be out there yeah um and i want to know what they're working on and so it's been really cool to have kind of this weird art form um where i can gain access to human stories of science in the outdoors, and then use my art to kind of highlight that and share that with other people.

Going back to the prisons you worked at for a minute, they were Los Angeles County State Prison and New York City's Rikers Correctional Facility, correct? Yes, that's right. And you said you decided to work there because of your dad's incarceration. Do you feel like during your time there working, do you feel like you learned more about your dad, other people that are in prison? Yeah, it's a big topic, right?

So I didn't work in either of those facilities. I just popped in for the day and taught a single workshop in each facility. In Los Angeles, I was working with 16 men serving life without parole. And in Rikers Correctional Facility in New York, I was working with 20 women who some were repeat visitors to the facility, some were first timers, but most of them were awaiting trial, right? They're kind of there for about two years or so.

So really different groups of people. In LA, those guys have been in the system together for decades. And there's a lot of trust there and a lot of humanity already because they all know each other and they've built these relationships. Where in Rikers, these women were on the defense. Like they were much more hard to connect with because they're protecting themselves. Rikers is one of the worst facilities in the United States, which is saying a lot. Um.

And, and everyone is different. Every story is different. Every reason for incarceration is different. And I think what those workshops did for me, as opposed to giving me more grace with like, you know, my dad's incarceration, for example, it more just helped me understand what I believed about incarceration in the United States. And so, I kind of grew up with this narrative that it's not even that bad to go to jail. You get to get a college degree and there's all these resources for them.

And I kind of grew up thinking that that was messed up and not how it should be. You should go sit in a dark box alone and be punished and be miserable and do nothing but think about what you did. And that that would make you know that's that was the effect of of a carceral system and then when i went in and i realized even just from this one drop-in visit like the the human connection that that not only i got but that all these other people in the facility got as a result.

Like art needs to be in prisons and restorative workshops need to be in jails and opportunities for humanity and creativity are what actually provide a sense of belonging and a sense of wanting to return to something and this feeling of being alive and joyful and connected to other people, right? And there was this really restorative sense in that practice, which it really changed how I see incarceration.

And obviously, I still think that jails and prisons are an important, you know, they play an important role in a country's security and safety. But I think that they're, my approach and mindset that I used to have is not the mindset and approach that I have now. And yeah, there was also like, nothing is black and white. I was having these wonderful conversations and laughing and being really playful with people who have.

Done really horrible horrible things like um yeah i mean i could look some of these guys up and see their crimes and they're horrific horrific and i had to kind of grapple with that too and i think that any experience that that pushes your previous understanding is a positive one anything that makes you reconsider your opinions is a positive one um and very few things in this world are black and white.

And so, I think the more that we're able to live in the gray area and kind of think about both sides of something is really important. So, I'm really grateful to those workshops on a personal level for giving me that opportunity. That perspective, I think, is very unique. You know, there are plenty of people who would d. Maybe come from your same background or a similar background and be like, I don't want to be anywhere near a prison, but you didn't have that perspective. You went to it.

You dialed in on it and you learned more. Yeah, thank you. It was hard and scary for sure.

And I don't think it will ever not be uncomfortable to walk into a jail or prison it is it is a weird experience especially if you're a little blonde girl bringing cake into a prison like it's a weird dynamic it's a privilege dynamic it's it's bizarre it's also just like yeah like i got a lot of grief from all the security guards like why the hell are you bringing in this cake to prison you know um there was like a really weird yeah I doubted what I was doing um for a lot of the entry point in,

and both times both workshops I had to wait hours and hours past when I was supposed to be in there you know because things fall through the cracks and they don't work out as planned which actually goes back to our previous conversation of remaining flexible and pivoting um yeah yeah Yeah, it's been true for that project as well. And yeah, and then when I got through in Los Angeles, that was the first workshop.

Once I got through and passed all the correctional officers, I was walking through the prison yard with a friend of mine who also teaches creative workshops in this prison. That's how I got my foot in the door there.

And um i was carrying a giant cake and so was she and all these guys just started yelling at me through the chain link fence like what are you doing you know it was like really funny kind, hilarious yelling like okay one guy was like are those giant rolls of toilet paper and i was like no they're cake and he's like i knew it and he starts screaming to this other guy no they're cake she said so um and i just like i don't know i felt really comfortable um

in that setting because like i said there was so much trust and um friendship between the men in that facility, and uh yeah like i got to connect with this guy luster polk who ran the bakery for the entire prison. He was incarcerated there.

And we had this great chat about his logistical process of managing, you know, I think, I forget how many people he fed now, I'd have to look back at my notes, but how he manages a bakery, how he had no background doing that until he landed in this facility and having to learn how to bake for, you know, maybe a thousand people or something like that. Yeah. And yeah, I had a great chat with a bunch of the other guys who were really into the arts. And it was just really wonderful.

And then going into Rikers was a totally different experience. And in that workshop, the correctional officers were super distracting during the workshop. They were taking all the tools, they were talking while I was trying to present. They were being really disrespectful. And when I finally had had it up to here and I went and said something, I was like, look, if you guys are going to be disruptive, you're not welcome to participate in this workshop.

This is for these women, and you're taking away from that. Which, to be fair, was really overstepping my bounds, and I probably should not have been so direct.

But I was like, I don't care, they're frustrating. um yeah and once i did that like the women in the workshop actually were much kinder to me um which was a really interesting power dynamic and they kind of softened like one percent which felt huge um but that gave me a chance to kind of like break into conversation with them more like they opened up a little bit more they were more willing to share um yeah it was just, I think the premise of taking cake where it doesn't belong and giving people

a chance to tell a personal story with this really fun, safe medium, it just kind of throws people off their guard, right? Like their defense comes down a little bit because it's just cake. You can't take it that seriously. And so whether that's in prisons or in outdoor spaces or with, you know, a really challenging topic for some people like climate change, like it just gives you kind of an access point that you I find it's hard to have without.

So I feel very grateful for for cake kind of yeah catching people off guard a little bit and seeming like oh it's just this safe stupid playful thing you know it's dessert how serious can it be and then giving it the power to to say nope it's just a blank canvas for expression and And now your voice and your story is what gets to go on this.

This has been really empowering. Very special. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like there's a lot of forgiveness and or understanding involved in all of this. Yeah, I don't think that that's been my goal starting out, but it's what I've come to as a result through these experiences for sure. And actually, I wouldn't even say forgiveness. I would just say more compassion or more like the willingness to be living in that gray area that I talked about.

Like it's not like I forgave my dad as a result like you know it didn't change that relationship at all and I don't I don't want it to but it made me a more compassionate person and it made me more open-minded and it made me more creatively engaged and and it gave other people an opportunity to be more creatively engaged and so it very much it didn't necessarily didn't necessarily affect my my forgiveness or my approach to forgiveness but it very much like increased my understanding.

Um and just my understanding of vulnerability too that's been really because in order to share my work and my art and my stories i have to be vulnerable in my approach to do that publicly and that has been a very powerful part of the creative process as well Yeah, I feel like there's also a parallel between the isolation of something like prison and then also going to these extreme environments that you do. Yes, there.

I mean, yeah, I'm obviously not behind bars when I'm out in an environment that I want to be in, but it is isolating at times. It is removed from the rest of society in a large way. I don't want to diminish the intensity of the carceral system, of course, but yeah, you're right. There is an element of isolation and personal struggle in any of these environments. Antarctica, mountaineering experiences, carceral facility, for sure. Yeah.

You've traveled to and worked, again, in some of the most extreme and remote environments in the world. Antarctica, a volcano summit in Kenya, underground in the Australian outback. Do you think certain human characteristics become more pronounced or noticeable in these places? Yeah, I think resilience and adaptability are the two that I have really identified with. Okay. Funny that I can just list those right off the bat. They must be important to me.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think in all of those spaces, people are so adaptable and just willing to do the best that they can with whatever resources they're given. And that's true of people, Who are trying to make art in prison with eggshells, you know, dye that they pulled off of M&M's soaked in powdered milk. That's something that a guy told me about. And collaging with toothpaste, right?

Like using what he had to create a piece of art that didn't exist before and living a life that brought him some sort of joy in this facility. To people who are living underground in the middle of the Australian outback, transforming old opal mines into beautiful livable homes that are so much cooler in temperature naturally than living in the 120, 130 degree temps above ground, right?

And as climate change is making these places even hotter, that resilience and adaptability are even more important moving forward. And for God's sake, you know, it is hard to work in Antarctica. It is programmatically challenging. It is personally challenging. It is, you know, physically, weather-wise challenging. But that program, I am about to go and complete my sixth season on ice, which is wild. And I've grown a lot in that program and learned a lot of new skills.

And I just really think that the Antarctic program, and I think most people who've worked in Antarctica for any program, whether it's America or the Australian program or the British program, et cetera, I think everyone would agree that working down there and dealing with these programmatic changes makes you, it mandates that you remain very flexible and adaptable. You have to look for other ways to solve problems. You're expected to support an incredible amount of science.

I mean, millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of science has to happen despite equipment being super run down and breaking and maybe not having the parts you need to fix it or personnel changes that are happening or just, I mean, you name it, it happens down there.

And all of these places, I think being able to be adaptable, remaining calm, not to say you can't get your feathers ruffled every now and then, but being able to, you know, rein it back in and think about like, okay, what are my tools? What can I do with what I have? That just seems to be a recurring theme that I've realized by looking back. It's not like I've gone into these experiences trying to find a way to make myself more resilient.

But looking back, I just see these links between all these seemingly unrelated projects and experiences. And that really, I think, just keeps being number one, which is a good reminder. Yeah, yeah. Have you learned anything about how place influences our perception of ourselves and our environment. Oh, I've moved. I mean, God, I must be at like 50 moves at this point in my life. I moved a ton growing up and I've worked seasonally for many, many, many years.

And I think a lot about place and its impact on me. And there's an impact on people in general. Um i think when i think about place the most i'm in alaska there is i wasn't born and raised here but i my this is my 15 year anniversary actually of first coming to alaska okay and um i moved here the week i turned 19 to work on the train and sell tours to holland america guests um i've run a bakery in denali i've glacier guided down in seward on a bunch of different glaciers there.

I'm now working remote in anchorage and i did a sound ecology internship at the anchorage museum a couple years ago so i've had kind of all these all these different experiences within the state there's still a vast majority i've never seen or experienced but every time i come back here i just I feel this exhale. And I feel like I'm home. This is the place I want to be. This is the place I want to settle and one day have a family. There's just no question to me.

I can't imagine living somewhere where I can't go to a glacier less than an hour from my front door. Um and i think alaska just creates this this like lock-in of place in a way like alaskans are alaskan right they're not like anchorageites and sewardites and all these it's you're there's just a state identity that really holds people here in a way that i feel so fulfilling it's like really, really makes me feel really safe.

I think about place a lot here, and I've thought about place a lot more as I've moved through different kind of polar and Arctic or subarctic environments. There's a lot of similarities between all of these locations. I went from my Antarctic season this year and went almost straight to Svalbard up in the high Norwegian Arctic for an art residency. And half the time I was in Svalbard, I felt like I was in Alaska, right?

It's like one of this weird kind of dystopic thing where I'm like, wait, where am I? You know, just these huge ice-covered landscapes are what I'm most drawn to. And there's so many similarities between all of them. But then once you understand an ice and rock-covered landscape, you know how to read that place, right? And it's like more, you're more tuned into it. And so then you can start to see these really kind of subtle, minute differences.

So the way that a glacier is carving this specific landscape or the ways that this fjord, you know, might have been, you might be able to see a moraine further down.

I just think place connects you to what you're seeing in a new way and really allows you to read not only the physical location that you are but also like internally where you are, returning to a place 10-15 years later you still feel that place right and so I think in my work I want to be able to tell stories of place and stories of people in that place at that time and hopefully revisit those things again a decade from now.

I think I've learned also a lot about place from my friend Clara Mesh that I mentioned earlier. She's just this incredible painter, born and raised in Fairbanks. She's ultra-connected to the landscape and this area. And she and I have had a lot of great wine-induced campfire talks that are also very rambly about the power of place and the power of your landscape and understanding where you are. Yeah. I'm currently renting Jeremy Pataki's place in Anchorage.

And yeah, he's the co-owner and editor of Edible Alaska. And he has this great printout on the fridge that is, I think it's like almost 50 questions that you're supposed to be able to answer about where you are, where you live.

And it's like oh explaining like explain your own local watershed like where does your water come from or like name name the trails closest to you and where they go right like just these very specific questions and I was looking through them and I was like oh my god I could answer maybe like five of these and probably not well and it was a really good I've been thinking about it a lot Because that's what I look at when I'm making my coffee every morning.

Like, yes, we can feel moved and connected to place. But then it's like, knowledge-wise, how connected are we actually to this place? How do we get our power? You know, there's this huge push for electric power in, or electric energy, excuse me, in Anchorage and in Alaska as a whole as our energy system is changing. And it's just something I would have never thought about before.

But I am kind of grappling with that recently is, yes, I can feel connected to a place, but I'm also moving seasonally. I'm moving all the time. I just go between Alaska and Antarctica, moving multiple times a year. And I call Alaska home at this point, but I better treat it like my home. I better be educated about the place that I live. I better be understanding the larger systems in place. I should have opinions about those systems. I should care about them.

I think that there's, yeah, this like hippy-dippy woo-woo feeling about place, but there's also the logistics of being from a place and choosing to root in a place comes with more responsibility. Music. So Svalbard. Yeah. Oh my God. You recently got back from a trip aboard a ship surrounding Svalbard where you spent three weeks making art. Sure did. It was unbelievable. I feel like I just had some huge scandalous affair that I'm like not prepared to talk about.

It was overwhelming that experience. Oh my God. I, yeah, truly you're the first person I'm talking to about it, which is very exciting. Okay. It was unbelievable. So basic premise is that a couple years ago, I applied to this artist residency knowing there was no chance I would get it. I'll just start applying now and maybe I'll get it in five years. And I got it. I got it the first year, which was really scary because it cost a chunk of change.

This is the only artist residency I would ever pay a lot of money to do. I really believe artists should get paid for their work. It's a huge premise of my practice. that I'm trying to hold to. But this residency is unbelievably worth it. And you go on to, well, you fly to Svalbard, which if people don't know where that is, it is a little island off the northern coast of Norway. And it goes, I believe, from 76 to 78 degrees north.

It's owned by Norway but the major town of Longyearbyen is the world's northernmost permanent settlement and it is I think the only place in the world that anyone from any country can go and work there with no visa requirements it's still a very Scandinavian feeling place predominantly Norwegian people, but there's also a lot of Dutch, Finnish people.

It's definitely heavy on the Scandinavia, but realistically, anyone can go and work in Longyearbyen and call Svalbard home for as long as they want, which is really interesting. So I traveled to Longyearbyen, Stayed there for a few days, kind of got my head on straight, figured out what ingredients I needed to purchase for my art project on board, translated all of that into Norwegian, which ended up not being useful at all.

I still had a hell of a time when I got to the Svalbard boutique in the grocery store in town and tried to figure out what I was buying. But got all that done and then met up with 26 other artists. So there were 27 of us in total that were accepted into this kind of cohort. There's between one to three of these residencies each summer.

And our group ended up being 27. We all met in Longer Bien and then boarded the Antigua, which is a three-masted, beautiful, tall ship that's able to take on some ice.

But it's still it's a large beautiful ship but a small vessel it's not a big cruise ship or anything when you look at it it looks like you know Shackleton's old wooden ships it has a metal hull underneath it's much more capable than these older ships but it still very much has that aesthetic and it is just beautiful okay, and the premise was that we were going to go sail through Svalbard depending on weather and ice cover on the ocean to kind of see where we went open itinerary,

and then everyone on board was well first of all we were the only people on board and so the entire expedition was completely and entirely catered to the art that we all wanted to create which is amazing and such luxury so we had four guides on board that were all rifle certified polar bear guides and they just did everything.

You could possibly imagine that an artist would ask you to do, you know, from jump roping over a long piece of saltwater taffy, which I may have asked one of the guides to do, you know, to driving us around in Zodiacs for hours and hours in silence trying to get underwater audio recordings, to. One of the artists had a bunch of people in green suits in front of this huge tidewater glacier. It was just like, there was a lot of really fun performance-based work.

There was a lot of writing that was happening, a lot of audio recording, lots of watercolor and sketch artists, film, photography. I was the only food artist, which is usually how that goes.

But just an amazing group of people, from the captain and crew to the galley staff that was preparing all of our food to our four unbelievably skilled guides and the 27 artists on board I just made unbelievable friends and it was the most fulfilling experience of you know there are 27 of us looking at the exact same landscape at the exact same moment in time having the same experience and translating it completely differently via artistic mediums and that process of,

being stuck on board a ship for two and a half weeks together and hearing people talk about what they were seeing or feeling talking about their work in general um.

It was just really moving and i've never had the experience of creating among so many different artists for such a long intense period of time and it just blew me away um and i would say the last kind of thing i want to add in there too is that of the the 27 artists on board, most people were having their very first experience in an ice-covered environment and. I found myself really jealous of them. I was like, man, I wish this was my first time seeing a tidewater glacier.

It was just so cool to... I've glacier guided and I've seen lots of people have first-time experiences with ice, but it felt next level on this trip. And it was just so special. And so once I got over that little feeling of like, oh, I wish it was my first time. Are they getting more out of this?

Because they're so, so, so excited. And I just felt much more like calm and grounded in seeing these places yeah and then i realized going back to what i mentioned earlier is like oh i actually i understand these places on a you know a deeper level because i've been in them so much right so one of the girls at one point was like this is so cool like you can't even tell if it's ice or rock or what it is that we're even looking at like we have no idea and i was like oh actually

like this is called zombie ice this is you know without So without like over explaining it to someone that didn't want to know, I was like, oh, I actually do. I know a lot about this. And so then that really shifted my experience on the trip of being like, wow, I'm so lucky that I live in a place where this feels like home and this feels comfortable to me. Yeah, that was really special. And it just made me appreciate Alaska so much more.

I was in Spalbard and I was like, man, I can't wait to be home in Alaska. This is so great. It made me feel more connected here, even though it was four days of travel away, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah. Earlier, we talked about how place influences our perception of ourselves and our environment. But I wonder how it affects your art. In this situation, you're on a ship and you're traveling. And the landscape, the scenery, your view, it's constantly changing.

How did that affect your work? Yeah, I think that's more relevant to, you know, the painters, the photographers, the filmmakers, right? You have this kind of moving landscape that you're trying to capture. Whereas my work cannot be very, well, that's funny, I've been saying this whole time that it has to be flexible and constantly changing.

But it has to be very planned out because I need to know what ingredients I need to bring with me I need to pre-measure everything so that I'm not just bringing 100 pounds of ingredients you know I'd love to bring only 50 pounds and so I need to be thoughtful about what those are and preset all of my recipes I was going into a ship-based environment with no internet for two and a half weeks. So I needed to make sure that I had all my ingredient conversion rates written down ahead of time.

I needed to make sure that my recipes were correct and troubleshooted and that I would be prepared without an internet connection for that long, no matter what happened. And so I couldn't be as flexible in what I was making thematically for that reason. And that being said, And my goal was to beta test a project that I want to make on a much larger scale, which is making a cake that looks like a glacier. And I mean, I could talk about it forever, but that's the short of it.

And then I would love to make it, like I said, much, much, much larger. So this is kind of the tiny ship kitchen-based version of that game plan. And then presenting it to a group of people and having all these hands coming away and taking slices and cutting away the glacier and then time-lapsing that. So we see this big glacial landscape, and then we see all these human hands coming in and taking it away. And the premise for this body of work is that it would be titled Eating Away.

So the idea that, yes, we're eating away at our environment, but also reciprocally how climate grief is eating away at us. And kind of creating a lighter space to talk about that.

And i just think so many people you know the messaging with climate and with outdoor spaces is just so depressing and it's so death focused and it's like these places are going away forever we're never going to see them again it's our fault like it's just it's really heavy, and i think acknowledging that it's heavy and then.

Bringing cake into the mix and allowing that to like be the centerpiece for this social experience for people that love you know glacier covered spaces or the outdoors in general it just like creates an energy that's unlike other spaces i've been in and so i made that on the ship um and made it for all the all the guides and all the artists and all the crew that we had on board and the captain came over to me and said, tonight's your night, like it's your cake party night.

So anywhere that you want the ship to face, if you want this side of the ship to be looking at this huge tidewater glacier, I'll make sure it stays there for four hours straight. I'll keep turning on the engine and yeah, adjusting things around. You're the captain for four hours. Tell me what you want and I'll make it happen, which was the premise for this whole experience. And it was just one of the most wonderful nights I've ever had creatively.

I had spent, you know, three days without sleep to make this thing on the overnight shift when the kitchen was available. And I was so tired. And that only elevated like the just amazing joy I felt having all these people together to, yeah, experience my art in front of a huge tidewater glacier and like have these conversations about storytelling in these spaces. Because, yeah, it was a moving landscape, but there was kind of an overarching,

larger story that I wanted to tell. And I knew that going in.

And so I was flexible in every other part of that. But it didn't matter which glacier we were in front of, you know, or which beautiful icy fjord we were in. I could be flexible on that in order to tell kind of this larger, more human-based story based around climate. And what were those conversations like?

Man it really ranged i mean yeah i think people on the ship we were all really grappling with that right like we were all visitors to this space yet as artists in residence we're going to be a voice for this place for many years as we all produce work and share stories from it and it's something that will hold with us forever like we will inherently be representatives of that place in some capacity.

And I think that, We all acknowledge that that's a privilege and that that's really bizarre that we get to speak about this place that we spent three weeks in of our entire lives, you know, that we all had the financing or funding to be able to make this happen in the first place. And so it was a recurring conversation on board, like, well, what are you going to talk about? Or what are you going to say? Or what are you making with your art?

And then I think all of us realized we were feeling so much pressure surrounding that entire storyline that we all just kind of relaxed a little bit and said, you know what, we're just going to take this all in, in the first place. You can't know what story you're going to have when you're just trying to absorb it. And there's a part of the creative process that is just time, right? Time to think, time to feel, time to have the big come down after this amazing experience.

Um and we're all in this huge you know 30 person whatsapp group text which is some people's worst nightmare and some people are loving it um but people are already putting a lot of you know resources in there like here's grants we can apply for here's other residencies or people are adding in like hey here's a collection of sketches that i just finally you know from the from the trip that i'm now putting into digital format that i wanted to share with you guys

or People are sharing excerpts of things they've written since we've left or just sharing favorite memories. It's kind of like this evolving story. Group journal I was thinking about the other day. And that's been a really special resource, I think, as we're all trying to figure out how we fit into this storytelling piece in a really thoughtful, caring way. We're getting to kind of do that together a little bit, even though we're all remote all over the planet. And so that's pretty cool too.

Do you feel like you have accomplished anything significant in conveying scientific ideas or contributing to important conversations surrounding climate change it's one of the things i struggle with the most is like what is my impact here i don't want to be a little cake maker that's just posting on instagram right like i want to have a deeper impact i want my work to carry meaning i want my work to create larger conversations.

I care about these places. I'm not just traveling to them once making art about them to become an influencer or something. They mean so much to me and I've spent so much of my life and time and energy and my practice, even just learning the skills that allow me to be in these spaces safely, right?

Crevasse rescue skills and wilderness medicine and risk management courses like I've put in time to be in these spaces in a really intentional thoughtful way I've joined science teams in the field to learn what they're doing instead of just reading an article about how to measure glaciers and then making art about that like no I want this to be from personal experience like I want to to know what's happening and so yeah I say

all that because it's really important to me that my work holds more weight than just a picture on social media. And for that reason, I keep pushing hard. I really want to install cake installations in museums or at the United Nations or in these other spaces where I don't see cake as an art medium.

And I really want you know to present artistically at a science convention and so in that sense, I want my work to have much more meaning than it currently has on the other hand I get all these amazing people reaching out just being like I've been a science teacher my whole life and I've never seen anyone communicating you know using this tool and it's so powerful like I've learned so much or people that are like I've never seen a glacier

and I probably will never get to but I feel so connected to them now like I really care about glaciers because of your work um, It's a signal to me that it's working, that my art is out there resonating with people, educating people about the things that I find most compelling and that I'm most curious about on the planet. And in that sense, my work is so successful.

And it's just helped me build this incredible network of people that care and that are curious and that live their lives in a really engaged way.

And in that sense my work is far more impactful than I ever imagined it would be like it's just wildly fulfilling but yeah there's always more right it's like oh I haven't actually contributed to anything important despite having achieved all these things that were beyond my wildest dreams I still feel like I'm like oh I haven't done anything important with my work, So yeah, there's no one answer. It's all a big spectrum. Those are all my, that's my explosion of thoughts and value.

How do you start baking a science cake? Does it start from a science perspective or from a baking perspective? Thematically, definitely from a science perspective. Okay. So design-wise, I need to know what I'm making before I start baking it. So I'll have the final design in mind before I go and start baking anything. So I approach with science first. That indicates to me what data set I'm working with, the size and shape of the cake, the scale of the information I'm presenting.

And then from there, I want to make the inside of the cake tell just as much of a story as the outside. And so in order to do that, I want to think about the place of the story I'm trying to tell. I want to use local ingredients as much as possible so for my. My time in Alaska, I'll make, you know, a Prince William Sound sea salt cake with spruce tip buttercream and, you know, a fireweed curd and a blueberry crumble, you know, whatever.

And then for up in Svalbard, like I made a dark rye malted cake with a Norwegian brown cheese buttercream and a Stroopwafel crumble. Like I want these cakes to tell a story of place and ground them in a way that vanilla cake or chocolate cake just does not ground a story in a deeper way. So that's a big process of my work is, yeah, then designing the inside landscape of that cake. What does that look like? Harvesting ingredients whenever I can, obviously really easy and fun and beautiful

to harvest spruce tips in Alaska. And I'm like, oh, I'm making it, I'm making a cake. I have to go on a huge hike and collect spruce tips. And then from there, I think it's also really fun and fulfilling for me to... It's not like I'm just unwrapping a block of clay. Oh my gosh, that sounds like I don't think that ceramics is a challenging art form.

That is not what I mean. It is very hard to do ceramics. But my point is that I have to build my own medium before i can start sculpting and telling a visual story yeah and i love that part of of baking and pastry i love that i have to build the thing before i can start to design the final product um, So yeah, the baking part of it is really important to me. I will never just use a box cake mix and bake some generic flavor so that I can design something.

If that's the case, I'll just wrap hat boxes in fondant. But no, if I'm making a cake, I want it to be delicious. I want it to tell a story that roots it to that landscape. So both of those things are really important to me, the science data approach and the internal landscape and flavor profile of that story. Mm-hmm. Is there anything that you still want to bake or a scientific idea you want to draw attention to in a certain environment? Very, very much. I really am still hooked on ice.

One part of me is like, oh my God, Rose, move on from ice. We've done everything we can do with white and blue and black. For God's sake, we've made all the water-based desserts we can make. But I just can't get away from it. Ice is just like, that is the love of my life. I love glaciers. I love sea ice. I love everything about it. But there's two other things that I always have in the back of my mind that I know I will move to next. And one of those is forest fires.

I would love to join a fire team in Alaska and have a personal understanding of how that works, right? Like prescribed burns and management of fire, emergency response, the techniques that actually go into it, and then the science behind fire, I think is super interesting. The habitat loss from fire, the effects of forest fires on glaciers.

It's just, there's so many compelling things, ways to approach it um and i know that once i think i've been hesitate hesitant to start it because i know once i do it's going to be like this ice project that's going to be years and years.

Um of obsession but yeah i already have a lot of really cool fire-based work in the back of my head that i would love to work on and then i also would really like to do a collection based around um deep seafloor mapping and kind of like the the thermal dynamics of deep ocean stuff and i got interested in that through um a friend down in antarctica who also is born and raised alaskan and she's really looking at the effects of freshwater glacier melt on larger ocean systems and has

worked on ships you know in greenland and has worked in antarctica doing more like volcano-based or seismic studies she's done a bunch of different stuff but it her work has really gotten me interested in ocean systems and then through looking into that i was like oh ocean floor mapping is super interesting as well there's these beautiful like rainbow below maps, thermal maps of the seafloor and the water surrounding it that I just, I think visually would be so stunning and compelling.

So yeah, those are kind of the two other main science-based things that I'm interested in. But I will say when I meet someone who is passionate about what they do, I find that infectious. So if I were to meet some scientist, it was like, these teeny tiny little microscopic diatoms are so unbelievable. I'd be like, wow, now I'm obsessed with diatoms, who knew? Yeah, I'd also love to make a gigantic tardigrade cake, you know, that's like a billion times larger than it actually is.

I think, yeah, sculpting its big chunky water bear rolls in fondant would be really satisfying physically, so that'd be really fun. Have you personally noticed any glaciers shrinking? Yes, 100%. In Antarctica, it's much harder to see that because I work out on a huge ice shelf. So an ice sheet the size of France, that is what I work on top of.

But yeah, so I don't necessarily see change in glaciers from where I work in Antarctica, but all of my scientist friends that research on that continent show me the data from the field sites that they're on. And it's, I mean, no question for sure. And then when I started glacier guiding in Alaska, I worked for Exit Glacier Guides. I'm still moonlighting for them every now and then this season, but three years of full-time guiding.

And we do land-based trips where we hike in and go ice climbing, or we also lead helicopter-based and ski plane trips to other glaciers in that area of Kenai Fierds National Park or just outside of it. And every single one of those glaciers that I worked on, I saw a personal change. And I was prepared to see a bit of glacier melt or glacier change as a glacier guide. Like, I figured that would happen. What I was not prepared for was the unbelievable rate at which my glacier,

you know, like we all feel like, oh, it's my glacier. I work on it. But yeah, my glacier was just disappearing. Like every couple of days, I have to get my clients ready in a different spot before we go on the glacier because we've lost another foot of melt in a week or another foot of ice, excuse me. It is just Exiglacier being a key example of a glacier that I have gone to almost every day for three summers in a row.

And I've seen a huge amount of loss. And we also had a huge sinkhole develop in ExaGlacier, which once that collapsed, it has a huge hole in the middle of it now. So now the whole back section of ExaGlacier is not connected to the toe at all. The toe is all just zombie ice or dead ice that's disconnected from the living glacier. And um yeah it's just it's unbelievable the personal experience i have been able to have in seeing a glacier vanish um.

Yeah, I have a lot of feelings about that. I don't want that to happen, obviously. But the fact that it is happening regardless, I feel this unbelievable privilege that I get to be one of the people to watch that happen with my own eyes and build a personal relationship with this ice.

I have a lot of clients that are like oh is it just so sad to you and yes it absolutely is but like that's not how I want I don't want to live and feel sad every single day because the things I love are are dying right like that's a terrible way to live your life and I just lost my best friend Lena to cancer two years ago this week and it's the same thing as she was passing away I was glacier guiding and I just saw so many parallels between that right like I never

want to talk about my best friend in this like horribly depressing way right like I want to talk about her because she was the best person I've ever known like she's amazing yeah I want to have tell these positive stories of her I want her like life to live on I want her to like I want to hold her in a loving way not in a depressing way and it's the same thing for glaciers and so yes if I'm watching them melt, I feel incredibly lucky to have such a deep relationship with that ice.

That feels really cool to me, and it's been a nice way for me to reframe that. And I also just feel really lucky that I got to be on glaciers as Lena went through cancer and passed away. I had this really grounding relationship with the ice that I haven't actually talked about too much publicly just because it's, yeah, I want to do it in a way that doesn't feel horrific and sad. But yeah, the glacier really provided me this, I don't know, this really grounding point in my life.

And I would watch this glacier move. I would watch it collapse and fall apart and then get compressed back together down in another section. And I just found so many parallels with the grief that I was going through, but also in the joy of the creative process in telling stories about glaciers. It all felt super intertwined. And I love having such a personal relationship, which goes back to our conversation about being rooted in place.

Yeah. Yeah. Everything is connected. So over the last nine years, you've made this big transition in your career, in your lifestyle. Do you feel more like a pastry chef or an adventurer now? Oh, that is such a good question, Cody. Yeah, I... I don't know what I am. I identified so strongly as a pastry chef my entire life. Like from the age of 14, I was working in kitchens. When I was 28, I moved to Antarctica to still work in a kitchen.

Um and then yeah in the last five years i have assistant managed a nasa research camp i have worked in hazardous waste management in antarctica over the winter i joined the antarctic winter search and rescue team for 10 months i became a glacier guide in alaska for three seasons, and now I manage this NASA research camp. I'm just, yeah, I talk about imposter syndrome or like fish out of water.

I'm just like half the time, I remember we were launching one day at our facility in Antarctica last summer. And I was like, all right, I think we're moving forward with launch. And I remember having this like out of body experience. I get floated above myself and I was like, do you know you are a cake decorator? What are you doing? What is happening? how did you get here? It's hysterical. And I really try to ignore the imposter syndrome because I've worked really hard to get where I am.

And it doesn't mean I don't feel like an imposter every single day, but I really try not to focus on it. But- The identity question that you asked is a very timely one because I realized on this Arctic Circle trip that I finally. You know, I, yes, I have a background in pastry, but I don't call myself really a pastry chef anymore. And that was really interesting to realize.

I now feel like my identity is more as an artist, because I think no matter what I'm doing, no matter what job I'm doing, no matter what place I'm visiting or working in, I am approaching it with this creative thought process.

Um and so i feel like the the the artist is kind of the identity that i most hold dear now, and my job is an arctic facility manager that's what i do for my work and i love it i'm passionate about it but like my reason for being is the creative work that i do and uh so yeah i identify much more as that and i definitely don't identify as like an adventurer an explorer like i do those things because i'm trying to tell a creative story and i want to do that you know with a personal firsthand

understanding of that place um but i have no interest in summiting some epic peak or you know like yes i adventure because of this other thing but it's not it's not what makes me you know that's not my driving force like to explore or to to reach some. Some mission or some trip that I'm trying to do. And on top of that, there are people who spend their entire lives getting the skills they need to do those expeditions and trips.

And I love being in cold, remote environments and challenging myself, but I also know I don't want to spend six months expeditioning across something for the title of doing that.

If I'm doing it for an art project hell yeah but i that's not where i get my my main fulfillment so yeah yeah artist i think it's been a big change a big identity crisis for a long time and yeah and then in svalbard i was like you know i don't think i'm in crisis about my identity anymore that's super interesting and really cool yeah you settled into it yeah i did settle into it it feels really good. I feel calmer in my creative process now.

Well, Rose, those are all the questions I have for you. I want to thank you for this conversation, for your perspective, your candidness, all of it. Thank you. I feel like so many of my interviews over the last two years have been so monotonous and the same story of like, how did you get to where you are today? And your questions were just super intentional and yeah, it gave me a lot to think about and just let me be really open in sharing.

So thank you so much. I love your work and the stories that you tell. I love listening to your podcast. I'm just super excited to get to chat with you at all. So thank you so much. Music. For more information about the Anchorage Museum, visit anchoragemuseum.org. This podcast was produced by me, Cody Liska, for the Anchorage Museum, with additional help from Julie Decker, Chattermark's. Music.