Had Michaelangelo been working with snow when he molded the shape of David, history would likely have looked upon the finished product through a much slushier lens. But he would have been better equipped to educate today’s youth on the topic of climate change – language barrier and century-hopping time travel limitations aside.
For students at the Christa McAuliffe School, that’s what they had Tim Gaudreau for. The artist from Portsmouth spent last week at the school as part of an artist-in-residence program, building a sculpture out of snow and other natural materials and letting Mother Nature run its course in altering and ultimately erasing the finished product.
Gaudreau guided students as they constructed a winding snow structure designed to replicate the polar ice caps and helped them make frozen polar bears in a variety of colors to affix to the sculpture. As temperatures warmed up – which they did literal hours after the final bear was attached – the polar bears melted into a rainbow pool that stained the snow, which was also shrinking under the sunlight.
“I’m what you would call an eco artist. I am concerned about environmental issues,” Gaudreau said. “I specifically wanted to make a piece that was temporary. And I liked the idea of working with snow, the idea of working with all natural materials.”
He certainly picked the right winter for the medium. There was no shortage of supplies on school grounds as students filled rectangular molds with snow and carried the pieces, frozen brick by frozen brick, to the sculpture, building what initially looked like a winding igloo.
While one group was working on that project, another was using flour and water to make homemade PlayDoh. Gaudreau helped the students form the dough into disks before carving out a polar bear shape, leaving a recess in the dough. He then took each disk home, filled the polar-bear shaped recess with colored water and produced polar bear ice cubes to attach to the outside of the structure.
“I was thinking about climate change, and an interesting way to explore the idea of the melting polar ice caps with the kids,” Gaudreau said. “Every moment, spring is rolling in. The spiral was kind of a metaphor for the ice sheet, and the multi-colored ice polar bears were made to populate the ice sheet. It’s about the ebb and flow of things, and as the ice melts the colored polar bears bleed into the remaining snow and become a changing landscape for as long as it takes for the snow to melt.”
Not long, as it turns out. With temperatures spiking into the low 50s for the first time just a day after the students attached the polar bears, the solid shapes were soon replaced by colored puddles that gave the entire thing something of a snow cone look. And less than a week later the entire sculpture was down to little more than a tiny pile of snow.
“The project will be under a lot of stress, and the piece won’t last long,” Gaudreau predicted on his final day at the school, prior to the forecasted melting. “But I think that’s part of the poetry of the piece.”
Equally important was the emphasis on raw materials. Every element of the project, from the snow to make the bricks to the dough to make the molds to the ice cubes that dotted the final product, was completed using natural supplies.
The dough to make the molds required little more than flour and water, and all of the molds – as well as the polar-bear shapes of dough cut out of them – were slated to go into Gaudreau’s compost pile upon completion of the project.
In the end, the piece had a short shelf life, but it delivered the precise message Gaudreau wanted to leave with the students who worked so hard on it.
“I think the important thing is understanding the materials one is working with and not fighting it,” he said. “You have to use its own potential.”
