Why ice is our greatest emotional landscape

For poets, painters and film-makers, ice is much more than just frozen water

Ice plays on the human imagination, the object of our fear and fascination. In the Book of Job, the Lord asks: "Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven who hath gendered it?" His wonder is divine and universal, musing on the mysteries of form, the crystalline artifice of concealment. "The waters are hid as if with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen."

We mere mortals might be left quaking in our boots. By its sheer otherness, ice can leave us sliding around in search of meaning, lacking the familiar footholds for experience and expression. But we remain receptive to its changing nature, transported by its appearance and movement, durability and fragility, left solemn at its ultimate impermanence. The opaque surfaces and spangled architectures of ice bring us to see so much more than water in solid state.