"It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store"

Time, touch, and temperature become coauthors of the work. Hours of kneading, packing, and smoothing signal a devotion to a material that refuses to be fixed. “Depending on snow quality” introduces the artist’s willingness to yield authority to conditions; no two snowfalls are the same, so no two pieces emerge from the same rules. The measure of three to six hours is less a clock than a barometer of texture, moisture, and air. The artist’s body learns the snow’s language: when it binds, when it crumbles, how it shifts beneath warming hands. Craft is not imposed but negotiated, a collaboration with fleeting matter.

Wet snow promises speed, adhesion, pliability, progress you can feel, and immediately threatens loss. That double-edged efficiency mirrors a broader creative truth: what facilitates making may sabotage endurance. Here, every decision has a thermal consequence. The material’s quickness draws the artist into a sprint that must end in care, because the work is already dissolving. The “tense journey to the cold store” enlarges the studio to include the path, the air, the weather, and the clock. The artwork’s narrative doesn’t conclude at completion; it includes logistics, contingency, and risk. Preservation becomes a performance of stewardship, revealing a desire to hold a moment that wants to pass.

Within that tension is an ethics: to work attentively with the world as it is, acknowledging that form is bound to temperature and time. The snowball’s fragility exposes the labor within it, making vulnerability visible. It is both sculpture and thermometer, a small register of climate and care, of how quickly things can come together and come apart. The practice asks for patience without guarantees, speed without haste, and control without domination. What survives the journey is not just a form but a record of negotiation, a held breath released only when the cold begins to hold it.