Over thousands of years, mineral-rich water that drips from limestone cave ceilings to floors builds up ossified calcium carbonate cones called stalagmites. As they grow up from the floor, they can merge with downward-facing stalactites to create massive columns. Like many geological formations, stalagmites are a document of natural materials combining with physical forces over a long period of time.

A photograph creates an image of a present moment, distinct from its bookends of past and future. Paula McCartney’s “A Field Guide to Snow and Ice,” a site-specific installation comprising 70 photographs mounted directly to the walls, is a document of time and form. Whether she is photographing the transparent facets of icicles or the granular volumes of gypsum-sand piles, she is drawn to, she said, the “recurrent forms throughout nature” that echo the slow accumulation of frozen water known as ice and snow. Because many of her subjects change so little over time, they take on the sculptural quality of figure studies. Yet she doesn’t always extract a present moment that will never be captured again. Set against backgrounds of either velvety black or crisp white, McCartney’s subjects employ the deepest contrasts of color film to provide poetic figure studies (as opposed to didactic diagrams). For example, in photographs such as Snowfall #6 the action of the falling snow is countered with the pressed stability of a single specimen of Queen Anne’s Lace that shares the snowflake’s delicate geometry.

Unlike many other photography installations, “A Field Guide to Snow and Ice” does not focus on a single image. McCartney combines images into deliberate sets and phrases that can be seen on their own terms or as part of the whole. These “series-sets” of images are installed in a circuit on the gallery walls, with breaks in between, there are multiple starting and ending points. The repeated images create a rhythm of visual affinities that can be seen across the gallery. Repetition, as an aid to visual learning, requires that there be resemblances among images, and it is in that very narrow difference between resemblance and sameness that McCartney’s project operates.

Field guides are usually written so the reader can identify and categorize wildlife, the better to understand the environment he or she is navigating. Like maps, the guides are designed tosituate and give order to information, based on a combination of field data and identifying characteristics, so that a walk in the woods is educational and recreational. The series-sets that comprise McCartney’s “A Field Guide to Snow and Ice,” unaccompanied by any scientific data, are a “field guide” of images that focuses on looking, rather than reading, as a way of learning. In her earlier “Bird Watching” project, McCartney more closely echoed the field-guide format by placing, then photographing fake birds in various landscapes. In brief notes each bird was identified by name and the location where it was photographed. In “A Field Guide to Snow and Ice,” she foregoes the captions and observational information so the repeated images in the gallery open up for the viewer’s visual comparisons. For example, McCartney’s photographs of her Queen Anne’s Lace and ice cones appear on opposite gallery walls, each one almost mirroring but just slightly different from the next. The fragile umbels (plant structures) are stable yet will wither and die, while the ice cones will eventually melt and disappear.

It’s important to remember that this “field guide” isn’t meant to be an official standard on snow and ice. Of course McCartney is the author of this work but she does not pretend to be the authority on the topic. The artist plays with differing levels of scale and background so there are close studies of gnarled crystalline icicles, piles of gypsum sand that, in McCartney’s hands, have a remarkable similarity to broad landscapes of snow-covered mountains, and ice floes that look like icebergs photographed miles above sea level.

There are few common denominators in contemporary art practice. However, there seems to be a “soft consensus” [2] against empirical knowledge. As aninstallation, “A Field Guide to Snow and Ice” is a gesture against totalizing theories and interpretations. McCartney’s work has confronted the notion of a typical field guide, and if it weren’t for a few clues the viewer might miss the subtle yet efficacious maneuver she performs by including images of non-snow objects— such as piles of gypsum sand—within the series-sets. But “Field Guide” is more nuanced than a simple illusion. With her overlapping formal references, McCartney dramatizes the limits of the relationship between field guide composer and reader. Her works are accurate only to a certain point because the artist is more interested in “logics of possibility rather than of validity or causality, the scientific principles … between ‘true’ and ‘false.’” [3] This project collapses the distinctions between scientific and creative languages so they are folded into each other. And it is a reminder that the field-guide format, which is so reliant on schemes of classification, backed up with field research, does not reflect the reality of natural phenomena. Such guides are only supplemental to what they label.