The story of Tumbler Ridge goes back into time immemorial, as the traditional territory of the Dane-zaa, Saulteaux, Tse’khene, Cree and Metis people, including the McLeod Lake Indian Band, Saulteaux First Nations, West Moberly First Nations, Kelly Lake Cree First Nations, and Kelly Lake Metis Settlement Society. In the 1950s and 60s, colonial industrial expansion into that territory identified significant coal deposits. In 1981, focused on this coal, which following the 1973 global oil crisis was especially valuable, two Canadian mining companies, a consortium of Japanese steel mills, and the BC provincial and federal governments signed a purchasing agreement that would require the provincial government to construct an entire town around the coal deposits. A rail line through the Rocky Mountains, two highways, and a power line directly from the WAC Bennett Dam at Hudson’s Hope would need to be built to service the town and move the coal to market. The Williston Reservoir, which was created by the Bennett Dam, is also known as Dinosaur lake because of the significant fossil footprints and skeletons that it buried in water. As we write this text, we are deeply aware of the flooding of the Peace River valley that is taking place at this moment to power the Site C Dam, an immeasurable loss. 

When Tumbler Ridge was incorporated as a town in 1981, it was completely forested. Coordinated by the Ministry of Municipal affairs, the town, all of its civic infrastructure, and the mine itself were built at the same time, anticipating that 10,000 settlers and mine workers would make the town their home. By 1982, all homes, the school, and other buildings were completely constructed. By 1983, the Quintette mine was fully operational. 

However by late 1990s, declining global coal prices brought deep uncertainty about the future of the town, and in the year 2000, the mine was completely closed and at least half of the population of the town left to seek other opportunities. At this time, as the story goes, yet another transformation in the city began to take shape: children of one of the remaining families were playing on a river bank and happened to notice large tracks in the bedrock. It was revealed that the area had significant dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous period. Government funding was procured to start a research centre, which inhabited the formerly shuttered elementary school. Paleontologists Lisa Buckley and Richard McCrea were hired to establish a robust paleontology research program, and they built a life around their work there. Warehouses and former classrooms were filled with fossils and latex and plaster casts of footprints. A visitor centre was created, and a proposal was made to designate the area a UNESCO Eco-park, imagining a new tourism-driven economy for Tumbler Ridge. 

In yet another shift, around 2016, a disagreement about the primary role of the research centre and allocation of resources––essentially a focus on scientific research vs. tourism––led to a decision by the elected town council to defund the research program. The fate of the fossils in the collections was uncertain––they had been made fugitive. 

Deeply interested in this unfolding situation, we traveled to Tumbler Ridge, landing in Fort St. John and driving south through kilometers of sub-alpine forest and towering windmills, which looked to us like animate creatures (new dinosaurs?) signaling yet another energy transformation in the north. Arriving at the centre, we met Lisa, the last remaining employee. We filmed her at work as she carefully labored to prepare a stone bearing Cretaceous-period theropod (bird) footprints, knowing that this work could not be completed. She took us through the school-turned-research centre where we photographed the dormant research stations and collections spaces, noting with interest the repurposing of school materials to build the workbenches.

We learned a great deal from Lisa: for example, the color pink is used in plaster fossil casts because of the detail it affords when printed in black and white scientific publications; when dinosaur fossils come out of the ground, having been preserved in the earth for more than 150 million years, they become very fragile, requiring a great deal of human care; and, the geographies that contain these fossil traces are, of course, ephemeral. The contact negative casts in latex and plaster may be the only record of those cretaceous bodies and footprints, as the landscape is ultimately disturbed by industry, natural forces, or tourists. 

In the time since our work with Lisa in Tumbler Ridge we have tried to express these ideas in the mediums we work across and through: ethnographic documentary photography, video, and an ongoing exploration of anthotype contact prints as fugitive photographic processes that use flowering plants as base emulsion and which will certainly fade over time. 

Collaboration is central to our practice, and with this in mind we were intrigued to find out that Lisa, now reinventing herself post-Tumbler Ridge, produces a YouTube series titled “Bird Glamour”, in which she lectures on bird biology while applying a makeup look inspired by a bird’s feather patterns and colors. As a response to her long time research on theropod dinosaurs and the fugitive chemistry of color in feathers, we worked with Lisa to create the video Speculative Therapod Makeup Tutorial, which vividly imagines what the theropods at the centre of her longtime research might have looked like: a playful meeting of art and science that looks back into time and speaks to the future.