Ice caps and cold sheets

I just found out about Nicole Dextras on the blog Bird in the House but it seems Google is well acquainted with her work. Dextras is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist who has worked with photography, installation, book arts, textiles, and paper working. The specific projects of hers that particularly drew me in were her ephemeral ice sculptures. Conveying both solidity and fragility, fixed and transitory, the literal and the figurative, these works are really striking and poignant.

Frozen typography * is an ongoing series of placed words —in parks, on the street—made up of letters created by freezing water into molds. The larger installations, like the 6 foot tall VIEW, involved hard labor of  building, arranging and filling the plywood and/or plastic molds, and then uncrating each letter. Some letters are tinted with coloring, some experience accidental intrusions of sand or leaves. All crack, disintegrate, melt, and eventually disappear, leaving only the photographic record. Placed in their landscape settings, the words seem like silent annotations. (see this blog for even more images)

Garments encased in ice * is a series installed on Toronto island. Skirts, blouses, dresses— are they vintage? they often dont look of "our time"— are embedded in blocks of ice or draped and frozen. Transparent, suspended the fabrics become sculptural evocations of sea life or shipwrecks washed ashore. Or more to the point— absence— evidence of something that was. 

*Both link to wonderful flickr collections by the artist