The White Station

Snow provokes responses reaching back to childhood. Historically many painted and photographic works have documented the epic beauty and wilderness of the land under snow; Sisley, Turner, and Ansel Adams to name a few. The White Station brings together works in which artists have experimented with snow as a physical material, for it’s potential to shape and engage us in its physicality.

Photographs by Andy Goldsworthy document ‘Midsummer Snowballs’, an incongruous siting of large snowballs placed in the City of London. Helen Chadwick’s notorious ‘Piss Flowers’ were formed by imprints taken of patterns made by the artist and her husband urinating into the snow. These images document the making of the work and include a poem by Chadwick.

In ‘Snowangels’ Axel Antas draws from childhood memories of a children’s game in his native country Finland. A person lies down in an area of snow-covered ground, slides arms through the snow and creates a print of his action. The imprints fade giving place for a new one to be made. Heidi Morstang’s recent film ‘A Doll’s House’ presents snow immersed forest landscapes, one fading into the next. Influenced by Ibsen’s play of the same name, the stillness of the visuals is broken by the somehow painful sound of skis slicing through the snow at speed and references the encountering of psychological boundaries. Filming during an unprecedented snowstorm in Tehran, Seifollah Samadian documents a woman, in full black chador, struggling in the storm under a black umbrella while waiting for a bus to a soundtrack of cawing birds, whistling wind and snow muffled city sounds.

During an arts-based research trip to Antarctica, artist Simon Faithfull will produce a new photographic work for the Pump House Gallery that will be shown as part of The White Station in January 2005. He will also be sending daily palm pilot drawings, his 'Antarctic Dispatches' charting his incredible journey, via email. You can subscribe to receive these through his website at www.simonfaithfull.org. These can also be viewed at both the ICA and Gasworks Gallery, London.

Pressetext

The White Station

mit Seifollah Samadian, Axel Antas, Helen Chadwick, Simon Faithfull, Andy Goldsworthy, Heidi Morstang, Seifollah Samadian