![[IMG: Ice Art: Celestial Keys to Understanding - Thumbnail] D](iceart-celestial.jpeg)
Imagine that you've lost your keys. Imagine that this is a nightmare and the keys are grotesquely large, are melting, you can't pick them up, they won't fit into the lock, you can't see the keyhole because the fog covers everything, someone is trying keys in the lock somewhere, but you can't see them and the keys aren't working.
It started out as a comment on ecological disaster, the notion that we've lost our way and that the world is slowly getting out of control and we can't stop it. But it evolved into a fugue state in which frozen keys, five feet long, twenty-one inches wide, and three inches thick of solid ice slowly liquefy as an ambient audio background plays the music of our lives, jingling keys that accompany us from the time we step out the door in the morning until we come home at night.
Sculptor Alison Ulman says, pointing to the heavens, "It's metaphysical. I think the world that these keys control is out of control. They're melting, melting… It's beautiful and sad… but tomorrow I'll put the molds back in my freezer and start again."
In the image, we see household keys made of ice melt slowly while jammed into a cylinder lock to which they are not perfect matches. This installation was created for Alison's residency at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, overlooking Land's End and the Golden Gate.
Auguste Rodin's Le Penseur (The Thinker) overlooks the installation as if trying to remember where he left his keys while we overhear someone unseen trying one key after another from a ring of many keys without success.
