Rosie Snell

The Art of Ice

My latest works have developed out of research trips to Switzerland and Greenland, leading me to explore snow and icescapes in all their different facets. From avalanches in the Alps to the ablation zones of melting glaciers.

Ice is a contradiction. This simple, chemical composition creates very different surfaces and landscapes. As it freezes it can produce complex snowflakes or simple icicles. It is so delicate and fragile it melts it with the warmth of the sun but also so powerful it can carve out entire landscapes.
These landscapes have endured for millions of years, but at the same time there is a temporality, an ever-shifting surface that groans under the stresses and pressures of its own environment.

As I have always had a great interest in the medium of paint, it seemed a natural move for me to try and explore these phenomena in terms of paint and how it can not only be used to represent nature but also how it can emulate it in terms of its behaviour. I use weak layers of paint between more stable ones to cause the paint to move under pressure, or a brittle paint over a flexible one to cause the surface to crack and fracture. I have also been working through these ideas with my drawings and watercolours, cutting and tearing the paper to replicate the pressures these landscapes undergo.

Through my works I aim to explore our often complex and contradictory relationship between humanity and the natural world and our increasingly urgent relationship with nature; the eulogizing and destruction, the aestheticizing and ultimately our longing for control.

‘Romanticism is nothing but the enhancement of potentiality’ – Novalis

The Art of Conflict

I have always had a fascination for the unexpected contrast between military structures and their surroundings. Technological developments in warfare, as well as past conflicts, have not only created purpose-built machines but have also had a direct effect on the landscape.

In these visions of post-nuclear pastoral, military objects have become monoliths, imbued with a quiet calm. Each machine static but at the same time predatory in its environment, the lack of human presence giving them an unnerving autonomy. Their camouflage appropriates the aesthetics of their surroundings, but can also be read as a language of anxiety and falsehoods. Two important attributes of camouflage are its emphasis on the domain of the visual and its strategic nature. Camouflage is a defensive strategy, a survival mechanism. The logic of camouflage is precisely to the lose the self in order to preserve the self.

Increasingly, new concepts and capabilities associated with our information age seem to offer a new type of warfare, a post-heroic warfare without bloodshed. But the fact of war is often a long way from our emotional or intellectual response to it. And however appealing modern theories of ‘Clean Warfare’⁽¹⁾ are, Clausewitz’s stark warning still seems disturbingly current; “The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.”⁽²⁾

My works are not those of a war artist, presenting a social documentation or conveying a particular political point of view, rather they endeavour to encompass both the past and the future, examining concealment, disinformation and the physical and psychological impact war has had and continues to exert upon our environment.

(1) Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Gulf War did not take place’.
(2) Carl von Clausewitz, ‘On War’.