Midsummer Snowballs

Just after midnight on 21 June 2000 - midsummer's day - Andy Goldsworthy supervised the unloading of 13 huge snowballs from refrigerated trucks parked by Smithfield Market in the City of London. Each snowball was several feet in diameter and weighed about a ton. Over the next few hours, they were carefully manoeuvred into predetermined sites on the streets of the City to be released from their plastic wrappings at dawn so that they were there to greet the workers in London's financial district as they streamed off buses and out of tube stations on their way to their offices. The snowballs were then left to melt - a process that, even in the warmth of summer, took anything up to six days. All this amazed, delighted and sometimes affronted the passers-by, and a rich element of "Midsummer Snowballs" is the public's responses: gazing, touching, smiling, laughing, or simply walking by and pretending to ignore the enormous mass of snow on the pavement. These reactions are covered in spontaneous photographs taken by a team of photographers who worked around the clock. The introduction by Judith Collins places the snowballs in the context not just of Goldsworthy's work but in that of earlier painters and sculptors. The story of the snowballs is told by Goldsworthy himself, and chronicled in the colour photographs.