Winter Solstice Sentinel - Sunrise

Winter Solstice Sentinel - Sunrise, originally uploaded by escher (hibernating)....

And so this past week I have been anchored.

I made this sculpture on the day before Christmas Eve and it took a week to prepare. Each night I created six ice discs and in the morning stacked them with layers of snow in between. I would leave each stack to freeze and begin on the next set of six discs. Over the next five nights I ended up with thirty discs made into five ice/snow stacks. One lunchtime I walked to a favourite spot of mine where I knew large icicles grew. In fact the place where I got the icicles for
this and this.

After this long cold snap, the icicles were more plentiful and larger than I have seen them before, so I took one of the longest, finest and most elegant and set about cementing it to a disc with slush for glue.

Each night that I was outside doing this, the air was cold and clear. The sky was a deep, navy blue with pin pricks of sparkling light, the planets and stars perfectly positioned as if never changing and from behind the bank of trees in front of me, the moon would rise turning the navy blue to royal.

I had in mind the Land Art Connections theme for December - Past, Present and Future, or, at least in hindsight I realised that what I was making spanned the winter solstice and how it connected this season to the next. As the shortest day is reached the days begin to lengthen once again and spring seems not so far away.

The more land art I do the more entranced and enchanted with change, cycles and the interconnectedness of all things, I become. Everything seems to be a wave. As daylight hits the bottom of the curve it bounces back up again to life and colour aplenty, until the top of the wave sends it back down again. These things can be seen everywhere in nature. This cold snap is to do with another cycle, a cycle of the movement of the air over the North Atlantic.

If it wasn't for this cold air and this regular cycle I couldn't have made this sculpture. It wouldn't have been below freezing all day and my discs would have melted. It wouldn't have been cold enough at night to completely freeze the discs and to stick ice to ice in time for the morning. If the cold snap wasn't consistent and long lasting I wouldn't have managed to make thirty discs and it wouldn't be as tall.

I've long wondered whether artists are aware of the concept they are trying to convey before they embark on creating something. I cannot speak for others but for me it comes out after the fact as though the simple act of creation opens the mind. I am fully prepared to learn something and have something deep within revealed, when I stand in front of another artist's work. That, to me, seems to be the formula:

- Artist comes up with idea
- Artist creates something with meaning
- Audience views art
- Mind is stimulated
- Meaning is revealed

But it seems it is much, much more complex than that.