The Frost Gates by Sabine Mirlesse was a series of seven frozen passages sculpted by the winds of the Atlantic during the winter of 2022/23. This ephemeral Land Art installation was inspired by the discovery of her grandfather’s engineering work on the behavior of frost at altitude in the 1930s and nods to the Gallo-Roman temple of Mercury, a place of pilgrimage for centuries at the summit of the Puy de Dôme volcano, uniquely situated above the mists and clouds. Seven portals were installed according to the constellation of the Pleiades, and designed to stimulate the formations of ice and frost due to the micro-climate, which grow and then melt with the arrival of spring. This work is Mirlesse’s first public art installation and is part of the New Worlds program of the Ministry of Culture.

The origin of this work lies in Sabine’s discovery of a box of photographic negatives during lockdown. The artist recalls finding an archive from the 1930s, in black and white, featuring the white shapes of frost and snow, a landscape topography that more closely resembles a volcanic terrain. These images were the documentation of scientific research that her grandfather had conducted in 1936 at the summit of Puy de Dôme, an engineer on a mission to study the effects of frost on airplane wings for the Ministry of Air.