The making of Frozen Time

Frozen Time makes use of ice, plastic filament, string, plaster, paint, metal, snow and ball bearings. This image is based on two vivid childhood winter memories:

I grew up in the Hudson Valley lakes region and every winter, the thing I would most look forward to were the ponds and the lakes freezing over. On the rare of occasion of consecutive days that hovered in the teens and nights in the single digits, water would freeze fast and smooth. Racing across the ice on one such outing my skates glided over a Canadian goose that had been caught out and frozen.

The other memory: ice storms. Not having a care of the damage they wrought, I was mesmerized by their beauty and infinite stillness.

Frozen Time was created in my backyard. It was a challenge to find the right timing in order to catch consecutive days and nights of freezing cold temperatures. I was living in Denver at the time and the winter temperatures could swing from 20 degrees to 60 degrees ten minutes later… okay, an exaggeration, but not by much! I set up a back drop and truculent plastic filament for the ice to build up on. I went out for three days, too many times to count, armed with a spray bottle filled with water to build layers of ice. On the second day, it had warmed up to just above freezing temperature, too warm to bulk up anymore ice layers but fortunately not so warm as to lose any of the ice that had accumulated. The condition was right. It was time to capture it on film.

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