Ice and Snow Art: 10 Frozen Sculptures, Snow Drawings and an Ice Record

Ice and snow make extraordinary art materials precisely because they do not last. From a thousand melting ice figures in Berlin to a playable record made of frozen water and snowshoe drawings hundreds of feet across, these ten projects show how artists turn winter itself into the medium.

1. Néle Azevedo: Minimum Monument

Brazilian sculptor Néle Azevedo, born in 1950 in Santos Dumont, Minas Gerais, has staged Minimum Monument since 2001. Hundreds or thousands of small, hand-made ice figures are seated in a public space and left to melt, usually within about half an hour. The piece turns the idea of a permanent public monument upside down.

Its best-known staging came on 2 September 2009, when 1,000 figures sat on the steps of Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt in an event sponsored by WWF to draw attention to climate change. The work has also appeared in Paris, Porto, Florence, Tokyo, Kyoto, Havana, São Paulo and Stavanger, and later in Azevedo’s Birmingham installation marking the First World War.

2. Rhea Thierstein: a giant ice ship for Vogue

Vogue US art director Rhea Thierstein built a full-size frozen ship as a set for a Vogue US fashion shoot. Some parts were artificial, but the result reads convincingly as a vessel locked in ice, a reminder that in fashion photography the image matters as much as the object in front of the camera.

3. Shout Out Louds: the Blue Ice record

In December 2012 the Stockholm band Shout Out Louds released their single "Blue Ice", from the album Optica, as a record made of ice. A very limited edition of ten box sets went out to chosen fans and media. Each contained a silicone mould with the record's grooves imprinted in the base: fill it with water, freeze it for six hours and play it on a turntable until it melts.

4. Jim Denevan: drawing on frozen Lake Baikal

Californian land artist Jim Denevan, also the founder of the Outstanding in the Field farm dinners, usually draws in sand with a stick and rake. In March 2010 he took his geometry to the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia. With his team, working in sub-zero temperatures and freezing winds, he created circles covering about nine square miles of ice, billed as the world's largest single artwork. The documentary Art Hard followed the project.

5. Daniel Gray: the rainbow igloo

New Zealander Daniel Gray built this igloo while visiting his partner's family in Canada. He filled about 500 milk cartons with coloured water, froze them into bricks and stacked them into a dome, roughly 150 hours of work. Because the ice is translucent, sunlight glows through the walls like stained glass. Read the full story of the An Edmonton Rainbow Ice Igloo Built by Family and Friends.

6. Toshihiko Shibuya: Snow Palette

Japanese artist Toshihiko Shibuya raised large pastel-coloured discs above the snow. Sunlight bouncing off their undersides tints the white ground below, so the snow seems to glow in soft colours, like giant sweets scattered across a field. The effect changes with the light and with every new snowfall.

7. Keith Moskow and Robert Linn: Ice Chimes

Keith Moskow and Robert Linn designed Ice Chimes, a 20-foot-tall winter sculpture shown in Boston in 2012 and at Dartmouth in 2013. It collects snow and ice, melts them with heated coils and lets the water drip through holes to grow icicles. When the icicles break off, they strike a metal bucket below, so the weather plays the sculpture.

8. Simon Beck: snowshoe geometry

British artist Simon Beck studied engineering at Oxford and worked as an orienteering mapmaker before turning to snow. In the French Alps he walks out complex geometric patterns on snowshoes, navigating with a compass. A single drawing can measure 500 feet across and take around ten hours. See more in Simon Beck’s Snow Art: Walking Geometry into Winter Landscapes.

9. Luke Aleckson: Imprinted Snow

Luke Aleckson, an art professor at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota, adapted traditional printmaking to snow. Instead of building an object, he presses patterned textures into an existing snow surface, creating a temporary print that low winter sun reveals in shadow and the next snowfall erases.

10. Sonja Hinrichsen: Snow Drawings

Sonja Hinrichsen makes vast drawings by walking repeated loops through fresh snow with volunteers. In January 2012 she and five helpers tramped a sweeping design into the snow at Rabbit Ears Pass in Colorado, photographed by Cedar Beauregard. More of her work appears in large-scale drawings in snow.

Art that melts: why temporary works matter

All ten projects accept that the material will change: ice figures melt, footprints fill with new snow, icicles fall. Photographs and films become the lasting record, while the experience itself belongs to a particular day, temperature and light. For more frozen creativity, see Tim Linhart’s Ice Instruments and a Swedish Winter Concert.

Related reading

• Jim Denevan’s 2010 Lake Baikal Snow Circles: Geometry on a Frozen Lake
• Ten Snow, Ice and Water Landscapes: Glaciers, Mountains and Frozen Shores
• An Ontario Ice Fort Built One Batch at a Time
• Michael Grab’s Balanced Stones: Looking Closely at Gravity
• Nicole Dextras’ IceShifts: Clothing Held in Ice
• Jim Denevan’s Lake Baikal Snow Drawing, 2010

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