Unadorned forms make for engrossing experience

WHAT IT IS: A minimalist installation that opens up to multiple experiences and interpretations, Continuum: When Water Pauses and We Move is part of the 2026 edition of the Warming Huts on the Nestaweya River Trail at The Forks.

German designer Franziska Agrawal, this year’s invited artist, has constructed a 30-metre passageway of flat arches, each made entirely from super-compacted snow.

As the title hints, Agrawal is flipping a common trope. In the summertime, we often stand on the bank and watch the river go by, the ceaseless flow making us aware of movement and change. In Winnipeg’s winter, the water is now still, frozen in place, and we are moving over and through it.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Trained in industrial design, Agrawal often works between art and architecture on site-specific installations. She often uses natural materials that can take on gravity-defying forms but eventually return to nature, whether that’s an ice hotel in Lapland or a sand sculpture on a summer beach.

Agrawal is head of the German team that recently took the gold medal at the International Snow Sculpture Championships in Colorado, and she also works with the Subzero Art Collective, an interdisciplinary, cold-weather-positive team that creates snow sculptures around the world. She knows winter.

From a distance, Agrawal’s Warming Huts installation, with its repeating, rigidly geometric white forms, is beautiful but maybe a little austere, a little chilly.

But looking isn’t enough. Continuum is meant to be experienced not just visually, but physically.

The work is activated by people walking or skating through it, and each person’s experience will be unique, depending on light, on time of day, on weather and atmospheric conditions, on surrounding sounds, maybe even on their state of mind.

When I encountered Continuum on a recent morning, it was cold (-22 C) but with a clear Prairie sky and lots of low, winter sun. As I moved from the open, flat, frozen expanse of the Red River — very wide at that turn where the two waterways meet — and entered into the hall of arches, the simple sheltering structure worked to focus my attention.

I became more sharply aware of the sounds of my boots on snow and ice, the rumble of a train crossing a bridge. I saw the long shadows of winter turning the snow blue, with a pool of shade at the end of the corridor almost indigo in its intensity.

Different people will experience it differently as the day, the season, the conditions shift. Agrawal’s work celebrates the temporary.

From a distance, the material of Continuum resembles hard marble. Up close, though, the surfaces of the snow show subtle texture and variation. The repeating frames, with their straight-edged regularity, echo fundamental post-and-lintel structures that were built to be monumental and permanent, but the snow forms of Continuum are deliberately fleeting, lasting only as long as the cold.

WHY IT MATTERS: It feels right that Continuum is made from our snow, the same snow that transforms our trees so beautifully after a blizzard or gets plowed into looming piles in Winnipeg parking lots. The same snow that can feel as soft and welcoming as a cotton blanket or as hard and rigid as that stubborn windrow on your sidewalk.

Continuum is a poetic distillation of the idea that we are a winter city, with snow becoming something that is clear-cut but complex, imposing but ephemeral.

winnipegfreepress.com/alisongillmor