Winter, Whirl
weatherworks, the window
“TheWindow” photo series has been on pause while I’ve been working on 2 other projects, land art, and ear songs:
1.Weatherwork 2026: Every winter for 12 years now I’ve created an enormous land-art installation made with weather (wind, snow, ice, rain, topography). Every installation is spontaneously conceived and resolved in-process, because I want the work to be entirely intuitive, new, fluid in the moment, reactive to the conditions, and with me in my body not in my head. I only use tools at hand — a piece of lumber becomes a stamper, for example. The installation has to be completed by 3 pm in order to photograph it, and it often gets erased overnight by the elements¹, so I work furiously.
This year was to be a lazier effort than last year (which involved creating the work one day, strapping two giant palette knives — skis — to my feet to Riopelle back and forth over it the next, taking photos in the rain all day following that, skating the 100’ work at midnight for video, and on the final day, getting a concussion.) But…
…it wasn’t. Play the below video with sound on:
Due to the depth of snow and the extreme winds I knew I’d have to create a 3D work to make it last as long as possible. So I shovelled for 6 hours one day, then re-shoveled the same area 6 hours the next. In literally — according to the news — the coldest part of the entire world that day. (You can see the polar vortex rolling in on the horizon in the top photo). More than forty degrees below zero in the wind (60mph+).
I had a vague idea that I wanted to do something like the ancient Jordan Wheels ², mysterious rings not in the sandy desert but on a plain of snow. I wasn’t sure how I’d color them (I see each weatherwork as a painting), but inspiration came around 1 pm, interiors cool, outsides hot, starting from the rim. I had sourced kitchen sifts and funnels to distribute the powder, but that was abandoned as waaaay too slow in the extreme cold (and extremer wind). Also I saw the work was being undone even as I was making it, so the spur-of-the-moment solution was to schlep out water (at 40 pounds per water container, and done 20 times) to spray over the rings to harden/strengthen them and crystalline the colors. Which worked.
But hardening the rings didn’t matter, because the installation got subsumed in blown snow.
So it goes.
2.Music 2026: Whirl” by K.I.A. The other project has been writing songs ³. (Dilettante not: I have released a few albums, as K.I.A. and as Shinjuku Zulu, and Sheryl Crow ⁴ covered my song “Mrs Major Tom”). “Whirl” is the first new release (hear here: Spotify ⁵, Apple, etc). The alt pop song’s origin comes from The Window photo series and text, specifically this substack post: Never Hold Snow. (The song keeps the poem’s joy, sadness, and in verse 2, narrative reveal. Below is the first verse; play with sound on, obvs):
NOTES:
1 Mother Nature is my Rauschenberg. (In 1953 Rauschenberg asked deKooning for a drawing, which he then carefully and completely erased. Effort, impermanence, authorship, aura, abscence, all resonant to the weatherworks. .
2 giant geoglyphs in Jordan of unknown origin and use, made thousands of years ago. Many discovered only due to satellite mapping.
3 and you thought I was joking last substack post when I mentioned “The Window: The Musical”. I was (maybe), but at least two other new songs have their lyrical origins coming from The Window. Music as a delivery vehicle for poems. More later.
4 “Mrs Major Tom 2026”, my poppier revisit of my original version (which was more chillout) comes out Feb 28
5 save, play on repeat, share, thanks: Whirl (Spotify)
BONUS IMAGE (some weatherworks over the years, with horizons aligned):
K.I.A. art website: nu4ya.com
Thanks for your support.