Making Art in the Snow
As we settle into the depths of winter, I’ve been reflecting on a snowy artist residency I participated in a decade ago at MacDowell. Located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, MacDowell has been a haven for creatives since its founding in 1907. Tucked away in quiet woods with spacious studios and a supportive community, it’s an ideal place to focus on work and experiment with ideas and new materials. I had first ventured there in the summer of 2011, returning a few years later eager to make work in the snow. It was frigid more often than not and storms frequently blew through. I was not used to working in those conditions, but I learned how to adapt, creating a few pieces that helped me reconnect with nature after spending much of the previous year making work in more urban settings in Cleveland.
Given the new terrain, I arrived at MacDowell with plans to intuitively work through my ideas. I first played around with building sculptural shapes with snow in the courtyard of my studio that I planned to light from all angles. I shoveled snow from the driveway and surrounding areas, and then was given truck loads of snow collected from the grounds by the residency’s maintenance crew. There was plenty to go around and they seemed amused to provide more material for me to work with. I then tried to illuminate the forms with a variety of lighting instruments, from theatrical gels to a range of flashlights. But it was my first time working with snow, and I could only shape it so many times before it was unusable. And so, I ventured onto other ideas. I was photographing every night, trying out different structures and forms, but it just wasn’t coming together.
One of the marvelous perks of residencies is meeting other creatives. You learn from each other, bounce ideas off one another, and get inspired by any odd thing mentioned in a conversation. One of my fellow residents, Lisa Kron, was a playwright who wrote a song called “Line by Line”. Similar in sentiment to Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, Lisa’s song referred to doing something one step at a time. Everything could be simplified by writing one line, and then the next; or a painter would make a line and build upon that, line by line. It spoke about the creative process, imposter syndrome, the ever present battle to begin new work. And I got an idea: let’s make a line.
The location I chose was a pathway created over a century ago that went from a very small pond where ice was made that then led up to the main house on MacDowell’s property. Ice hasn’t been made the old fashioned way in decades, but the clear path with pines that were very much planted remains as evidence of this history. To install the 300 foot roll of rope wire light that would be featured in this piece, I worked alone, climbing the trees to build a rope suspension system between two towering pines. One rope with pulleys allowed me to move left and right across the pathway to center things, while a second rope with a centered pulley was used to raise and lower. I was hoping to put enough tension on the whole system to send the rope light back quite far, but it just made a curve instead of dropping straight down. So after a bit of troubleshooting, I managed to pull the rope light back as far as I could and secure it so it wouldn’t slide forward. Finally, I had to carefully cover my footprints with snow.
It was 15 degrees below Fahrenheit that night, so I didn’t stick around during the film exposure. After running an electrical line from the installation site back to my studio about 500 feet away, I lit the rope light, opened the camera, and went to dinner, enjoying the warmth for a bit. Afterwards, I returned and closed the camera. Every night was so dark at MacDowell, without any trace of fog or low lying clouds to bounce light, so I scheduled the exposure to occur during twilight, to render something in the sky. I also needed some light from the sky to create reflections upon the snow in spaces beyond where the rope light was present. The photograph you see above is my favorite of the shots that resulted from that installation: it has the most visible individual lights, giving it a prismatic effect.
After that piece, I was looking for features in the landscape that I could work off of. I saw a tree that had fallen down, and loved the composition when looking at it through some pines atop a small hill. I photographed it shortly after a nor’easter had hit, leaving plenty of snow for the light to bounce around on. The Kelvin temperature of the scene was overwhelmingly blue, so it created an image (Pipeline (Blue)) that was more about atmospheric conditions than me manipulating anything with light. Shortly after that, the weather jumped from 15 below zero to more than 45 degrees, and everything melted. It was during the thaw that I made Pipeline (Red). It was a hard install because while there was snow on the ground when I started working, I didn’t want to make treads through it. So I had to sneak around the piece to not leave footprints that would be visible within the frame of the shot. It was such a different snow than what I had worked with just days prior.
Since it was so cold, I was bundling up for each shoot in an abundance of layers. The key to dressing for the cold is that you don’t want to find yourself sweating. Unfortunately, I was pretty much always overdressing to compensate for such bitter conditions, donning multiple under layers with a heavy wool sweater, puffy vest, and two, sometimes three, jackets for the coldest nights. All I was missing was snow goggles. And I was sweating. As a result, I needed to stop back in my studio to change my clothes in the middle of a shoot more often than not. The floor of the studio was heated with geothermal heating. Experiencing the extreme shift in temperature with warmth radiating from the depths of the earth had me constantly thinking about what’s below the surface, the hidden expanse just below my feet.
For the duration of my residency, the 4x5 and Hasselblad cameras that I used for each shoot stayed outside in a back exterior room of my studio. It was partially warmed by its proximity to my heated studio, a Goldilocks ideal: it wasn’t below freezing like the true outdoors, and it wasn’t toasty like the interior of my studio. The film also sat outside in that back room, and I only removed it when I was packing to leave the residency. Any extreme shifts in temperature would have caused condensation on the film and cameras, thus rendering them unusable. You need to bundle or wrap the camera when working in frigid weather, and slowly unwrap the layers to gradually acclimate the film and camera to prevent condensation or icing. There are now camera and lens warmers to help with this, and some photographers will make use of hand warmers to help with the process. I learned all of this from a friend who frequently photographed in extreme environments, including the South Pole several times. While it wasn’t quite as cold at MacDowell as the South Pole, she was the perfect person to ensure I was fully prepared to work in unfamiliar conditions.
Drill, Pipeline (Blue), and Pipeline (Red) allowed me to focus on my frustration with fracking, the bombardment of media surrounding it, and feeling that I was unable to do anything about it. These pieces examine my personal experience of how I was affected by everything that was playing out in the news during that time: the hierarchy of control, power structures and societal relationships with technology, ecology, and nature, and what is considered valuable. I had just completed extensive projects working on commissions for the Cleveland Clinic and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa), and while those were deeply fulfilling experiences, they brought my attention away from the natural world. I felt that I wasn’t making a difference in the world. I needed this residency to sort through my thoughts and find new ways to create artwork that gave voice to my concerns. Working in the snow was far more difficult than I had ever estimated. Approaching a new subject with unfamiliar materials and approaches in frigid 15 below temperatures was incredibly tough on my body and mind, and made the entire experience all the more challenging. But I learned so much through the process and look back on this work with pride for how it helped me recenter myself within my artistic practice.
With the year coming to a close, I want to take the opportunity to sincerely thank each and every one of you for following along with these stories and supporting my work. Being an artist is a weird and wonderful thing. Each act of generosity and care within the arts is greatly appreciated, and the simple act of paying attention to someone’s vision and voice makes the world a little bit kinder. May you each have a fantastic year ahead, filled with ample artistic discoveries and inspiration.
Wishing you all well.
- Barry