While Erin Slade sees the process of painting as a respite from conceptual thought, her work is preoccupied with the enormity of our current social and environmental problems. Ablation is a series of paintings – each named after a melted Washington glacier – which explores the contrast between the unprecedented physical comfort of our modern lives with the often-unseen reality of our environmental impacts.

“Ablation” is defined as “the loss of ice and snow from a glacier system”. It also refers to a cardiac procedure that Erin is awaiting.
In painting, as in life, one can never go back. Everything must be integrated, both good and bad, moving ever forward. The colour abstractions in Ablation use acrylic, graphite, ink and gouache, often diluted, to evoke movement, water, and flow. The work wrestles with the persistent loss of going forward, layer over layer; each stroke added is also a removal. In response to the visual theme of water, and the emotional themes of progress and loss, the works are named after dead North Cascade glaciers- a reminder that our lives exist in the environment. Without even thinking about nature, or engaging with it, we impact it daily. While the paintings do not depict the glaciers, they are connected to the ablations in the same way all seemingly innocuous details in our lives are- the connection between the minutia and the diminishing.