i'm sonja hinrichsen, and i'm a visual artist. snow drawings actually started out of play.t an artist's residency in colorado, and i had snowshoes because i wanted to hike in the mountains. i found those really big, pristine fields of snow, and i just had to do something with them. ♪ so i started walking these patterns, and it became interesting to me when i took out my camera and realized that the shadow that gets cast into the imprint makes the pattern. if there is no sun, there's no pattern. in 2009, there was this pilot who just offered that he could take me up so i could take photographs. it was pretty amazing because i had no idea how it would look from the top. i was in that airplane. i was like "wow!" i can't believe this." i feel like spirals are sort of inherent in us and in nature. our galaxy is a spiral. our fingerprint is sort of a spiral. so i just feel like it's a form that we all understand. it's very meditative, walking these patterns, basically having the landscape sort of evolve around me. and that triggered the idea that this would be something to share