TL; DR: (wind + snow ÷ rain) x (time-sun) = weatherwerk
Here’s a little interlude from The Window series posts, some visual vitamin D for your eyes (or maybe a little retina burn) to combat this gray season. Every winter for the last 10 years I’ve made large weatherworks. (See below). They are done in below-zero conditions on a frozen lake, using wind, snow, rain, ash, powder, and anything at hand: bull rushes, pebbles, a plank of wood, a doily. The conditions change every minute—the wind picking up, clouds rolling in, the sun setting, the temperature dropping. This year the ice was very loud, making huge warping sounds that resulted in visible cracks. The image above is the most recent work (2023). It’s about 30’ in diameter. Below, in no order, are more works from the last decade…
NOTES:
-Each artwork takes about 20 hours to do, and exists for about 30 minutes after completion (when the sun goes down). They never make it through the night, ruined by snow, rain, animals or wind. The 2023 work was unusual—it lasted three days, and, even better, it got more beautiful as the weather warmed up, with the colors mixing in the melting snow (as you can see in that top photo.)
-Tools/materials: Pole. Sifter. Plank. Snow. Powder. Rain. Wind. Shovel. Sun. Snowpants. Wooden lattice. Cider. Shells. Cardboard. Tree branches. More cider. This year’s innovation: wooden planks duct-taped to my boots. (Sigh).
-I sometimes lay out canvas or paper on the snow and use the same techniques — found wind, snowdrifts, precipitation, flora, etc — to make hardcopy paintings, see those HERE
-The earthworks are kinda digital — snow crystals, ash and powder flecks are discrete units, just as pixels are in a jpeg, or the dots on the page in the final prints of the works.
-If you look closely you can spot a fox footprint, or sometimes a leaf or stone. When noticed they give the installation and photo a sense of scale, though I purposely photograph the work in ways to make perspective and distance ambiguous.
-BONUS: I heard a theory that crop circles are actually bookmarks in time. They are infographics specifically placed in temporary crops that get harvested every season. So an advanced culture (who can cross time and space) just has to input that month’s crop circle shape into their spaceship computer to travel to Earth in, say, August 1979. (Hey Zeta Reticuli, here’s a colorful one for January 2023!)