Basia Irland makes giant books out of ice and releases them in rivers. The 'text' of each book is seeds from local plants; as the ice melts, seeds are released and the plants start to grow by the rivers.
In June 2009 after showing the Ice Receding/Books Reseeding video at the Albuquerque Museum, eighty participants boarded buses and travelled to the Río Grande to witness and help launch eleven Ice Books. The conditions were right (and ripe) for Tome II, a 300-pound Ice Book with paragraphs of local cottonwood seeds (Populus fremontii), to be placed next to the Río to melt (instead of putting it into the river to float downstream). It was the season during which the cottonwood seeds would normally begin to take root and germinate. However, along much of the Río Grande, since the river has been straightened and not allowed its annual overflow into the floodplain, cottonwood seeds fall onto dry land under the canopy and are unable to sprout. The melting Ice Book recreated, in microcosm, the right conditions for cottonwood seeds to grow.
Notes: Physicality, dual meanings (seeds/ice)
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