Each winter, Kirby Andersen decamps to his family cottage in Prince Edward County, a quiet, rustic space far from the cloistered din of the city. Here, he waits, closely tracking the weather and ever-shifting winds, as Mother Nature prepares a sprawling white canvas.
An abstract painter and visual artist known professionally as K.I.A., Andersen has spent the last decade experimenting with what he calls “weather work,” working alongside natural winter elements to create giant, colourful compositions on a frozen bay of Lake Ontario.
Andersen uses layers of dyed powders — the same ones used during the Hindu Holi festival — along with shovels, wooden blocks and other found items to create his pieces. Each artwork takes up to 16 hours to create, often in freezing temperatures.
“It’s a completely intuitive process,” Andersen said, emphasizing that he never plans his artwork in advance. “It really makes you pay attention, because you’ve got a finite amount of time. I’m completely subservient to Mother Nature.”
As the days pass, and the weather changes, so does the composition — the colours and patterns transformed by rain, wind or snow.
He describes the work as a gruelling “full-body experience”: “My hands get cold, my cheeks are frozen and I’m trudging these heavy bags of powder across the ice.”
Andersen, 55, was born in Calgary. At 21, he moved to Tokyo. His early exhibitions were experiments in the ephemeral: paintings made up of rearrangeable panels that he would hang in subway stations or temporarily project over Shibuya crossing.
Thirteen years ago, Andersen relocated to Toronto, where he started scaling up his approach, creating larger and more complex works. Eventually, he was drawn to the expanse of the outdoors.
“Growing up in Alberta, you’re always looking up at the big sky or at the mountains in the distance,” he said. “There is a huge feeling of space.”
Andersen started his most recent artwork in early January, after waiting for the right conditions: “sunny with a light wind, so I can drift the colours.”
Early in the morning, Andersen covered large swaths of snow in layers of powdered dye — oranges, yellows and magentas — before using a shovel “like a giant palette knife” to create long linear shapes.
As the sun began to set, he scrambled to fetch his camera and a ladder, and snapped a few photos of the massive work, which extended tens of feet toward the horizon.
The next morning, following a night of wet snow, Andersen noticed that someone had cross-country skied across his work — the two parallel lines revealed bright colours beneath the fresh snow: “I immediately strapped on my own cross-country skis and spent the next few hours maniacally going back and forth.”
On day three, it rained heavily, melting the snow and mixing the colours together, creating yet another version of the creation.
On the fourth day, the rain froze, trapping the fluid colours beneath an inch of ice. “I grabbed my skates and began skating across the work,” said Andersen. “As I skated, the ice began cracking, creating this interesting tectonic fissure that I hadn’t expected.”
On the fifth and final day, the bay was swept with a mighty wind, casting drifts of snow across the ice. At one point, the wind knocked the artist’s glasses right off his face, sending them skittering some 200 feet onto the lake.
Taken together, the photographs from across the five days are a marvellous collision between the artificial and elemental, a kaleidoscopic collaboration between artist and nature.
“It’s like a special moment in time, like when a flower blooms and it’s only there for a week or two,” said Andersen. “And it’s beautiful partly because you know that eventually it’s going to be gone.”
