Faculty of Art

Printmaking & Publications

Marketa Holtebrinck

Will the Snow Remember?

Laminated casts of snow made with Japanese paper (gampi tissue, Tosa Sushi), on surface-treated steel rods, 1/8th inch diameter.

“I’d like to say that this work is snow. But it wouldn’t be right. It’s snow twice removed; it bears resemblance to snow by contact to something – a plaster cast – that was in direct contact with snow. So it's also a memory of snow, a physical reminder of what snow was like at a certain point of timespace when liquid plaster touched it and descended into the tiny cavities of air that make up seventy percent of snow. It's also a memory that snow held of a place, an archive of constant, imperceptible movement. It's also ten square meters of paper (and forty linear feet of steel, one eighth of an inch diameter).As an early melt set in in March, I was still making snow and thinking with a strange distress about the disappearance of the snow I came to know. A repository of traces and transitory processes recorded in snow surface and its deep architecture, is it how it remembers the ground underneath? And if so, does melting mean forgetting? My mourning was only alleviated by the hitherto reliable fact that snow always returns in the winter to come. But what if not? I think of people close to me whose capacity to recall, to remember has been affected by age or by illness, or trauma, and started thinking of snow in similar terms. When it comes again, will it remember the place? Us? Whole ecosystems depend on it. The work is about this mix of certainties and anxieties and fears and magic.”