Just after midnight on Midsummer Day 2000, thirteen huge snowballs, each weighing about a ton, were unloaded from refrigerated trucks and carefully manoeuvred into position on sites across the City of London. The snowballs had been made high among the Scottish mountains in the winters of 1998 and 1999, then transported south to be unwrapped and allowed to melt in another century in the heart of
the City.

Concealed in the snowballs were materials mainly gathered around Goldsworthy’s home in Dumfriesshire: elderberries, ears of barley, wool, crow feathers, beech branches, chalk, river pebbles and even rusting barbed wire and discarded fragments of agricultural machinery. Little by little, as the snowballs melted, these were revealed – a unique confrontation between the city and the landscapes of wilderness and agriculture.

This is four-dimensional sculpture in which the lifespan and history of the snowballs are as important as their appearance at any moment.
In hundreds of images produced by a team of photographers working around the clock, Midsummer Snowballs records the slow transformation of the snowballs and the rich variety of responses from the public who were all involved in a giant work in progress. The excitement that this generated is the keynote of this striking and unusual book.

Judith Collins was until 2000 Senior Curator of 20th-Century British Art at the Tate Gallery, London. As well as lecturing and broadcasting, she has also written widely on many aspects of modern British art and design.


ISBN 0500510652