Snow joke

You might call Scarlett Hooft Graafland a kind of method artist. For her latest project You Winter, Let's Get Divorced, the Dutch photographer spent four months living in the remote Inuit community of Igloolik in northern Canada using the bleak, unfriendly icescapes as both setting and subject for her series of visual jokes. Like Lemonade Igloo (2008) above, they are surreal natural sculptures (with performance art thrown in) made out of ice, snow, people and props. Barmy they are, but serious nonetheless. We may complain about the odd snow flurry and a touch of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but Hooft Graafland's images speak of a much more troubled, inexorable relationship between man and his environment – one that you can't really appreciate until you've lived it.

Holly Kyte