rope compass and lets it float away. “The circle was locked and then, suddenly, it was joyously made free to move and rejoin the flow,” he declaims poetically, before skipping off like Fotherington-Thomas.

2010 – Karl Lagerfeld, scenting frost on the fashion breeze, imports a giant iceberg as the centrepiece of his spring Paris catwalk show for Chanel.

2011 – Kitty Kraus, in a group show of international artists “who explore ideas of flux and ephemerality” at Manchester Cornerhouse, shows a block of inky water with a light bulb at its centre. Titled Untitled, it melts onto the gallery floor creating “topographical patterns that viewers must navigate around”.

2012 – Neha Choksi, an artist drawn to “scenarios of erasure, exhaustion, detachment and disappearance”, creates Iceboat, a film of herself rowing across a lake in a frozen boat until it melts.

2013 – The Holy See climbs aboard the freezer truck, installing a refrigeration unit in its debut Pavilion at the Venice Biennale to keep a painting by Lawrence Carroll on ice.

2014 – For the Liverpool Biennale Norma Jeane installs a solar-powered ice-making machine in the Old Blind School, which – for want of July sun in Liverpool – leaks. In October, coinciding with the publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change, Olafur Eliasson arranges 12 blocks of ice in the form of an Ice Watch in Copehagen’s City Hall Square. Cut from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland, the blocks’ total weight of 100 tonnes is equivalent to the amount of inland ice currently melting every hundredth of a second. “As an artist I am interested in how we give knowledge a body,” explains Eliasson. “What does a thought feel like and how can felt knowledge encourage action?”

2016 – In Granary Square, King’s Cross Alex Chinneck erects a Christmas tree

Not Found – complete with lights – contained in a 7m ice cube. Titled Fighting Fire with Ice Cream, it poses no risk to the station’s power supply as it is actually made of clear resin rather than water, and the pool that accumulates on the ground around it – which revellers presumably have to ‘navigate’ – is made of wax.

While on the subject of melting ice caps, it may

interest you to know that this year’s Venice Biennale will see the launch of an exhibition of highlights of something called the Antarctic Biennale which, under the patronage of UNESCO, advertises itself as ‘developing Antarctica’s cultural potential’. Tell that to the penguins. Its most prominent partner is Kaspersky Lab, a Russian global cyber security company based in Moscow. Smell fishy? It is. As it happens, Kaspersky Lab has just been named as one of the companies with ties to the Kremlin that paid Michael Flynn a sledload of cash for a speaking engagement in Washington. You want ice with that, or would you prefer oil and gas? Kaspersky is not the only greenwash merchant dealing in ice art. In 2015 Rolls Royce commissioned Isaac Julien’s glacial video installation Stones against Diamonds, set among the glistening ice caves of Vatnajökull in Iceland. No doubt BP is even now planning something. Ice art is not as transparent as you’d think.

 

Gallaccio wasn’t the first to make art from ice; she trod in steps already dinted by 1960s masters Gyula Konkoly, Allan Kaprow, Ian Baxter, Rafael Ferrer and Paul Kos. More memorably, perhaps, in the 1970s naked cellist Charlotte Moorman performed avant-garde compositions by Jim McWilliams with a melting instrument between her legs and Serbian ice queen Marina Abramovic, in a performance titled The Lips of Thomas, cut her stomach with a razor