Editors Note: My final creation for this praxis reveals itself through decay, with each layer being destroyed revealing the layer underneath/inside/hidden by it. The final layers were, for simple necessity, created first and the first layers were created last.

For this reason, this praxis is presented in reversal order.

The stick will fall, the pyramid will melt, the cross will be revealed, the blocks will melt, and then someone will get my message.



I finished by putting a stick in it. The final pyramid was fairly small, but I think the stick pull it together. Coming out of the top of the pyramid, it draws attention to the spot and gives it a sort of memorial feel, like you might make for a friend who you've buried in the artic tundra after they've died fighitng off a bear. He saved your life and now you're wracked with survivor's guilt so you carve your way into the snow and ice and put him in his final resting place. Later, you get eaten by a different bear. (I don't really know where I was going with that). I left it be at that and left to go someplace warm. My project was finished.



When I returned from the lets-not-freeze-to-death break, the spot was fairly easy to find, simply because it was where the snow had been distirbed (which let me find it in the field) and then once I got in the area the x stood out. Since I still couldn't find a shovel, I used the tea pot to gather up snow which I poured on top of the x and then sculpted into a four sided pyramid. This was kind of difficult - only the top layer of snow was recent enough to gather up easily and the lower layers of snow were too chunky to make good sculptured out of. Also occasionally the wind would come along and blow bits of it away. But I kept at it, gathering, pouring, and packing until I had a large enough pyramid that enough who encountered it would probably figure out that it wasn't a natural occurence. This was, after all, the point of the exercise. I didn't want people stepping and crushing my hard work.



Once the ice was placed, I used the snow that I had dug up to cover it back up again. I took pains to cover it completely, with no corners sticking out or nothing. Once it was covered I poured the left over water in a square around the buried cross and then made an x connecting the corners. I'm not sure if this'll be visible once the next layer is destroyed, but who can say? At this point I went inside, figuring that this was a good moment to take a break - from a distance there was nothing to see.



Nobody did. Lacking a shovel, I was forced to make due with my hands, a cup I found, and a my feet. Of all these things, my feet turned out to be most useful - the snow consisted of a very light top layer that had fallen today over a frozen lower layer, which I could kick to pieced. The cup wasn't very useful at all and it blew away. After clearing out a good sized hole, I placed the blocks, starting with the larger ones in a square. I had intended to have the other four blocks on top of the first ones, but when I tried to do so they fell off. So instead I put them between the larger blocks, leaving me with sort of a cross shape. I poured water over each one too freeze it in place.



It was actually a couple days before I managed to find time to actually place the things. I was pretty busy so the blocks just sat in my fridge, taking up space for a while. Finally came Saturday, and I had the time. During my last ice project, I carried my creations in a bag and they broke, so this time I used a box. When I got to campus, I scouted around and decided to place my creation in the middle of the field in the middle of campus. I also looked around and tried to find a shovel, with no success. A few times in the past I managed to borrow a shovel from behind the art building, but no luck today. I had to go to a meeting, so I left my box of ice by a tree in the middle of a field. I figured nobody would steal a box full of ice.



There was a little bit of trouble in freezing the notes - they naturally wanted to float to the surface. I got around this by only filling my molds (I used tupperware) halfway, letting it freeze the note in place. Then I'd fill the other half with water and let that freeze. Actually it didn't work out that way because the ice would float. So I had to take the ice out, flip it over, fill it back up again, and then let it freeze. This lead to slightly lumpy blocks of ice, but it was ok. I used two small containers and two large ones, so there was two different shapes of ice blocks. Once the notes were frozen in place, I made another four blocks for structural purposes. Removing the ice was no trouble, so I just piled them all up in the back of my fridge.



I'm not sure where I got the idea for this one. I started the night of the Minnesota caucus, using the other half of the paper that I didn't use for the caucus notes. Dividing it into four notes, I wrote a note to the world on a theme that I've been focusing on fairly often recently: how much I hate the winter. The four notes read
Summer is Coming
It Won't Stay Cold Forever
The Winter Will End Soon
The Cold Will Fade Away
Because it's easy to forget that sometimes during the winter. This too will pass. The plan was too freeze the notes in blocks of ice, make a sculpture with the blocks of ice, and the bury the ice sculpture in a snow sculpture. Each bit would melt in turn, slowly revealing itself. Once I finished writing the notes, I wrapped them in packing tape to keep them from being destroyed when I froze them. This didn't actually work perfectly, but I think the tape successfully kept them together enough.