Joshua Stocker

Update: Won the competition!

Along with the heavy snow falling this week came a brief from my teacher. It asked us to create a typographic design from snow. Of course a million ideas fill your head as you imagine the incredible sculptures you will now create, but when you get out into the cold wet snow, you realise its not as easy as you expected. In fact it turns out that sculpting anything from snow requires far more skill than I have. Feeling the disappointment along with my housemate Jon, we decide the best thing to do is work together. Going into the snow with a mate means you don’t give up so easily. In fact today, we spent the entire day creating our work. Last night was spent brainstorming, deciding on what we wanted to write with the snow, and the different ways we could do this. We came across a quote by Paul Gauguin which read “I shut my eyes in order to see”. We both loved it, and found that creating a series of images would allow us creation of more ideas.

The sentence was split into I shut / my eyes / in order / to see

I SHUT

Once the sun had gone down we set about creating “I Shut”. The first words of the sentence. We used the tops off our coffee and tea holders which are shaped like domes, using them to create perfectly rounded Hemispheres. We made dozens of these which were placed to created italic typography. This was perhaps the most beautiful thing we created all day, but the photo we got here simply doesn’t do it justice.

MY EYES

This piece was created by scraping snow off the ground. I didn’t want us to just get a stick and draw in the snow though, I wanted it on a different scale altogether. To begin with we used a trolley to draw the guidelines with. We then used the lid of a box to scrap the snow away. This technique took a huge amount of time, and was extremely hard work. With such little time to get the whole thing finished, I thought about what we could do to speed the process up. Turning the trolley upside down, I found the weight meant I could simply pull it along, and the snow would come with it.

This sped the process up massively. It was still hard work, but after an hour or two we were finished.

IN ORDER

The idea here was, to create the lettering using blocks. Almost like bricks of snow. We gathered up a bucket full of snow, and took it to the path where the snow had faded. The best thing about creating this piece was how so many people walking past asked about what we were creating. Many of them went off to see the other typography we had created around the common, a few even asking where they would be able to find the finished images. I loved creating work which was then left for anyone walking by to have a look at.

TO SEE

This was very simple, and the easiest of the 4 to make. We decided to create the letters on a pile of logs. Scraping the snow off two parts, then putting snow back to create each letter. I really love this setting, these were probably the most successful photographs of the day.

.
.
.
.
.
I SHUT MY EYES IN ORDER TO SEE
PAUL GAUGUIN
.
.
.
.
.