Invited by the Verbier 3-D Foundation to create a new work in situ, artist Sophie Whettnall devised an innovative and poetic approach by orchestrating a local ratrack machine as her primary creative tool. This experimental collaboration with the alpine machine produced a monumental drawing across the alpine landscape — an immense network of intricate lines engraved into the snow, juxtaposing image within image and transforming the mountain itself into a dynamic canvas.

“The idea is to encourage these locally utilized machines to go beyond their usual tasks and push the boundaries of drawing,” Whettnall explains. This ambition reflects her ongoing practice, which delicately navigates the intersection between human intervention, technology, and the natural environment.

The work’s scale and temporality resist traditional artistic boundaries. Whettnall’s careful negotiation with the snow, the machine, the technician, and the landscape resulted in a choreographed interplay between control and chance. As the snow melts and shifts, the drawing evolved, subtly dissolving the distinction between deliberate creation and natural process.

Set against the unique cultural and ecological terrain of Verbier, RATRACK is a meditation on the constructed nature of alpine landscapes. Verbier is often imagined as pristine wilderness, yet it is shaped daily by machinery and human labour. By foregrounding the snow grooming machine which is typically invisible in its function as both medium and performer, Whettnall reveals the underlying infrastructures that sustain this fragile environment and the narratives we tell about it.

A diptych video work was also developed from the performance footage, offering a contemplative encounter revealing the interplay between the mechanical and the poetic.

Ultimately, this work invites us to reconsider the mountain not as a fixed backdrop but as a site of ongoing negotiation where art, environment, and human endeavour converge in moments of fragile balance and poetic resistance.