Sonja Hinrichsen’s Snow Drawings: Six Stages of a Growing Project

On the ground, the activity can look as simple as following the person ahead. From above, those steps become sweeping loops, repeated circles and lines that give a snowy field a completely new rhythm.

Walking becomes the drawing tool

Sonja Hinrichsen’s work includes large snow drawings made through participation and repeated movement. The collective aspect matters: volunteers contribute to these large designs, making the finished work a record of shared effort.

The wider photographs reveal relationships that participants cannot see in full from their own position. A single curve makes sense locally; the aerial view explains how it belongs to the whole.

A temporary surface gives the work its character

Snow will change, so the photograph preserves a particular stage of the artwork. Compare these deliberate paths with footprints reshaped by wind. For another use of repetition to create a recognisable form, explore owl-shaped log art.

From one artist’s footsteps to collective work

The original gallery begins with Snowmass Village, Colorado, in 2009, where Hinrichsen’s snowshoe walks during a residency developed into drawing. Those early images establish the basic idea: repeated movement can change a large white surface without adding a different material.

Ooms Pond and Carpenter Ranch, 2011

At Ooms Pond near Chatham, New York, local volunteers joined the process. The Hayden photographs identify Carpenter Ranch and the Yampa River setting in Colorado. These separate locations show the project developing across different events, with people and terrain contributing to each particular arrangement of marks.

The original account stressed how much the completion depended on suitable weather. That is part of working in snow: the surface is both the drawing material and something that may change before the drawing is finished.

Rabbit Ears Pass and Catamount Lake

The Rabbit Ears Pass work was dated to two weekends in early 2012. Catamount Lake followed in 2013, with the account describing a larger volunteer effort over several days. Those details make the collective labour visible alongside the aerial patterns.

From participant level, someone follows a line and sees only nearby steps. From above, loops and neighbouring forms connect. The two perspectives explain why the photographs are an essential record of the work, not merely publicity for it.

Revisiting the Yampa River’s former course

The 2014 project used the snowy surface of a reservoir to evoke the river’s earlier flow, according to the original account. That gives the pattern a geographical subject as well as an abstract form. The drawing becomes a way of thinking about a landscape changed by a dam.

The dated locations make Hinrichsen's development visible: Snowmass Village, Ooms Pond, Carpenter Ranch, Rabbit Ears Pass and Catamount Lake each belong to a particular project. Moving through them reveals how a practice based on footsteps can grow into shared work across a much larger surface. The aerial view gathers those individual contributions into loops and repeated forms, while a ground-level view keeps the effort of walking apparent. Read the two scales together and the patterns become more than mysterious circles: they are records of people following a design through snow.

Participation leaves a visible trace

Each walker contributes a small part of a pattern that becomes legible at a larger scale. That connection between individual action and the shared result is central to the project’s character.