Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures.
As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.
Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured.
A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.
Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned.
The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s.
The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it.
I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.
A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.
Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.
The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone.
I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.
People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city.
The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.
The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.
Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.
I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.
It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store.
I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball.
I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.
