Mark Antony Haden Ford & Rebecca Ford

In the frozen expanses of Mongolia, British environmental artists Mark Antony Haden Ford and Rebecca Ford created site-responsive works during the “Javar” residency, exploring impermanence, material transition, and the fleeting nature of presence. For the artists, nature is not a passive object to be represented, but a co-creative force, a condition through which meaning emerges. Their work engages with the ephemeral states of frost, ice, and snow, responding to the landscape in dialogue with its transient forms.

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Amid temperatures plunging to -30°C, frozen surfaces, crystalline textures, and shifting light became not merely environmental conditions, but the material and formal logic of their work, shaping rhythm, pattern, and internal coherence. Ice, snow, and light act as language, structure, and process rather than inert matter.

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On the first day, the artists attuned to the lake’s edge, observing spatial rhythms and tracing subtle patterns on stones—a humble gesture of temporary alignment, a symbolic initiation into the logic of the frozen landscape. In the following days, they worked directly with ice, snow, and gravel, exploring opposing processes: melting and freezing, consolidation and fracture; transforming impermanence and continual change into a visual language.

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Their attention was drawn to an abandoned freight ship frozen into the ice, a powerful relic of movement arrested. From this presence emerged sweeping, wave-like, radiating forms across the frozen surface, embodying memory, migration, pause, and the transience of human, cultural, and natural life. These undulating forms resonate as a visual echo of history, impermanence, and continuity.

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Formally, their work intersects Celtic symbolism, geometric archetypes, and nomadic cosmologies, transforming geometry from a formal representation into a system of energy, flow, memory, and temporal rhythm. This intersection acts as a mediating structure, bridging knowledge, spatial perception, materiality, and symbolism.

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The installations balance monumental scale and delicate ephemerality, inviting viewers to step away from stable forms and engage with liminal spaces of disappearance, movement, trace, and erasure. No form is ever fixed; under natural forces, the work continues to shift, fragment, vanish, and endure, embodying an open process of memory and presence.

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Beyond ecological reflection, the residency illuminates the interdependence of humans and nature, the fragile logic of time, and the aesthetics of impermanence.

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Through ice, snow, light, and traces of erasure, their work channels the immensity of the Mongolian steppe, the warmth of the land, and the enduring pulse of the Taiga into a luminous dialogue between past and present, human and environment, transience and continuity.