ICE MITTEN
Performance: Nuuk and Sisimiut, Greenland. May 2003.
Duration: 20 minutes
Presented as part of ‘The Wolf in The Winter’ performance collective.

Ice Mitten was presented to small audiences of Inuit people in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and in Sisimiut, a small town inside the Arctic Circle.

My hand was buried in a block of ice that I held overhead as I entered the room. The weight of the ice is measured such that the strength in my arm melts faster than my hand becomes frozen.

The audience knows about ice and stirs in discomfort.

Survival handbooks advise not to allow freezing to creep past the second knuckle of the hand but the ice becomes too heavy to lift overhead before that point is reached.

Removing the hand from the ice I strip my clothing and in a foetal position proceed to scratch my body with the frozen hand, its fingernails grown and sharpened for the purpose.

I am depleting a surface, sculpting my skin.
This action speeds the circulation of blood in the body, the quicker to re-warm the hand.