Fat water droplets slide down the blocks of an ice labyrinth and only the amphitheatre carved out of snow and decorated with ice still sparkles brilliant white against the evening sky.
Officials at Finland’s Snow Show of frozen works at three locations near the Arctic Circle say a spell of unseasonably mild weather that has forced them to remove lights from some exhibits is not a dark sign of the end but a welcome transformation bringing their cold art to life.
An ankle-deep pool of water covers the floor of an aquamarine-coloured ice jail, making the footing slippery. But the random hand and foot imprints of visitors now appearing in the giant blocks of ice of some works are an early but intended part of the Snow Show’s life-cycle.
“When there is enough warmth inside this jail, the prisoner is once again free,” Hilkka Liikkanen, director of the art museum at Rovaniemi in the far north of Finland said of the ice jail sculpture first envisioned by Yoko Ono, the widow of former Beatle John Lennon.
Like all the works of art in this exhibition, the frozen labyrinthine prison conceived by Ono and Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and made out of over 1,200 giant ice blocks is designed to melt away as Winter turns to Spring.
“These works are at nature’s mercy...The wind eats up the ice, not so much the snow, but this heat is weighing the snow down,” Liikkanen said, adding that the perishability of ice and snow was one of the main attractions of the show for artists.
Liikkanen is co-curating the show with New Yorker Lance Fung and says the project that brought them together also paired 15 artists and architects from around the world.
“Artists and architects are creative people while builders have the knowledge and expertise to make these ideas reality... When the technical people hear the idea, they try to see whether there is a way to make it work,” she said.
Snow Show chief builder Seppo Makinen and his team of professional builders created countless new techniques for the exhibits, including one for the seemingly simple task of colouring large blocks of ice without all the pigment sinking to the bottom of the block.
“Snow and ice are living materials. In every weather, in every light they look different. And when you stand inside one of these works, you can feel their smell and their taste,” Makinen said.
In Kemi, an industrial town on the coast of the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, kids posing and playing in front of Enrique Norten and Lawrence Weiner’s rectangular pillars of blue, green and white dyed ice look like glamour models on a photo shoot.
“I love this one because of its simplicity,” said Raija Kinnunen, visiting the exhibition from the neighbouring town of Tornio.
In Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland, some of the matchbox-sized digital screens embedded into the icy walls of a transparent tunnel hang off by thin wires.
Before the mild weather kicked in, Tatsuo Miyajima’s digital counters blinked numbers from one to nine representing life and a blank screen for death. Now the “life counters” hang loose and a message about life’s transience may be even more poignant.
In Kemi, the industrially purified and bottled water in Diller, Scofidio and John Roloff’s ‘Pure mix’ – a frozen chessboard mosaic of 81 branded waters from around the world – has already started its intended Springtime voyage. – Reuters
Last update on: 8-3-2004