“Icepool”
The Snow Show, Lapland, FinlandKiki Smith, artist
Lebbeus Woods, architect
Lumen Citation and Regional Award 2005, Illuminating Engineering Society.
The Snow Show, an art exhibition at the Arctic Circle in Lapland, Winter 2004, featured an ephemeral frozen pond marrying art, light and ice.
The installation explores the use of fiber optic technology under extreme climatic conditions, with temperatures 20 degrees below 0. Buried in layers of ice, the fibers realize the looping pencil lines of architect Lebbeus Woods, which in turn were influenced by the promise of this flexible technology. Streaks of light serve as design and light source—revealing shadowy figures by artist Kiki Smith hovering below the surface.
Pools of ice, geometric in the ground, with figures—human and not—frozen, suspended in them. You walk, skate on the ice pools. You look down, into the ice. You see, or almost see, the figures. Snow blows across the ice pools, covering edges, and the figures, too. In the day, the figures are shadows in the dark ice. In the night, the ice glows and the figures are illuminated, though darkly.
—Lebbeus Woods
