In March 2010, Californian land artist Jim Denevan and a small crew drew a field of giant circles across the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia. Covering about nine square miles of ice, the drawing was hailed as one of the largest single artworks ever made, and from the air it looks more like an alien landing site than human handiwork.
Who is Jim Denevan?
Jim Denevan, born in California in 1961 and based in Santa Cruz, is best known for vast geometric drawings raked into beaches. Working with just a stick and a rake, he draws circles and spirals across the sand that last only a few hours before the tide wipes them away, so the full design survives mainly in aerial photographs and film. He is also the founder of Outstanding in the Field, a travelling farm-dinner series.
His large works have taken him well beyond the beach: Lucerne Dry Lake in California, Jean Dry Lake in Nevada, and in 2022 the desert of AlUla in Saudi Arabia, where he made “Angle of Repose” for Desert X AlUla.
The Lake Baikal snow circles
The Baikal project was commissioned by The Anthropologist, an artists’ platform linked to the retailer Anthropologie. Denevan’s team marked enormous circles into the snow on the lake ice, their sizes based on the Fibonacci sequence, so that rings grow and shrink in a mathematical rhythm across the surface. Clearing or marking the pale snow exposes the darker ice beneath, and that contrast makes the lines readable from far above.
Conditions were brutal. The crew worked in sub-zero temperatures and hurricane-force winds, and some gusts blew away parts of the drawing as it was being made. The project was later the subject of a 2011 documentary, Art Hard.
How the drawing reads at every scale
On the ground, each line looks like a simple track in the snow, and the people in the photographs are tiny dots beside the rings. From a plane, single circles join into clusters, and the clusters into one huge pattern stretching towards the horizon. One graphic from the time compared the outline of the work with a map of Manhattan to show its scale.
Lake Baikal: the world’s deepest lake
Denevan could hardly have picked a more remarkable canvas. Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia between Irkutsk Oblast and the Republic of Buryatia, is the deepest lake on Earth at 1,642 metres, and at 25–30 million years old, the oldest. It is 636 kilometres long, holds roughly 22–23 percent of the world’s fresh surface water, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.
The lake freezes from about early January until May, with ice typically 0.5 to 1.4 metres thick, and up to 2 metres where wind piles it into hummocks. Olkhon Island, 72 kilometres long, is the largest of Baikal’s 27 islands and the third-largest lake island in the world. Go with a local guide on the ice: cracks and open water shift with wind and temperature.
More snow and ice art
- other artists using snow as a medium
- Baikal ice without the human-drawn pattern
- Simon Beck’s Snow Art: Walking Geometry into Winter Landscapes
- Lake Baikal Ice Percussion with irkDarbuka
- The Sheyenne River Ice Circle Seen by George Loegering
- A Car Recovered from an Opening in Lake Ice
- Zaria Forman’s Greenland Icebergs in Pastel
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