Ice Pics
We cherish photographs for, among other things, their ability to “freeze a moment in time” and the imp in me was gleeful at the idea of literally freezing my images. I started with single flowers, inspired by my friend Samuel Torres’s images of frozen floral bouquets, then tried flowers in bottles.
The ice, with its random sweeps of bubbles and pockmarks and its variable opacity, makes each frozen treat a surprise.
I’ve frozen marbles, my late foster-grandmother’s pearls, seaweed, beach glass, string lights (illuminated inside the ice cubes), my wedding ring, and popcorn. I use unusual fruits from the market, gooseberries and dragonfruit, and fairy weeds, as I called dandelion puffs as a child, from my garden. I froze a photograph of my late father, as a boy, before the world broke him, alongside a miniature metal airplane, his favorite thing as a child.
Once frozen, I free the ice blocks from their molds and shoot them in a light box, set them on glass with a light underneath, or hold the ice up to the sun to bring the objects and colors to life.
The specks in some of the images remind me of outer space, which sparked me down the path of gathering information about the solar system, looking up the number of planets and their sizes relative to each other. I found round containers of various sizes and started freezing planets then putting the newly frozen planets in a baking dish with more water and refreezing them in the night sky. I make multiple replicas (not precisely to scale) and my good family takes it in stride when they have to maneuver around stacks of ice trays to get to the frozen ravioli or when they have to listen to me lamenting the way the tiniest little planets melt before they’ve even had a chance to refreeze.
Teeny bottles holding items from my walks, bark, lichen, a downy flicker feather, a small animal bone, seed pods. I call this one Apothecary.
My friend Jesse told me that the railroad tracks along Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing is a prime spot for finding animal bones. It didn’t disappoint. In addition to bones, we found egret feathers. The project slipped off the table and shattered, this is a fragment of a much larger Ice Pic I was working on.
I’m obsessed with the shells and rocks that wash up onto the beach with seaweed growing from them. I found these three on a beach in San Mateo on one of my coastal walks.
A simple arrangement of flowers from my garden in a vintage bottle (which is now fragments of a vintage bottle)
One of my many solar system models. Very realistic. Practically photographic. Playing with ice and food dyes has been a fun way to get a better understanding color and texture.
Ground cherries and raspberry.
Vintage bottles
Freezing a range of items from different eras of my life has become a gentle way to continue piecing my life story together. This one is a small metal pin of a scuba diver. I had the wonderful fortune of learning to dive with a former girlfriend and creating this Ice Pic brought that time of joyful discovery back to life.
Another highly scientific rendering of the solar system.
