Acrylic on recycled tin can.

13cm by 8cm by 7cm.

This can series Alex has made for his planned residency in Namche Bazaar, Nepal. Alex was given the brief to make art from waste which accumulates on Mount Everest. The project in collaboration with Sagarmartha next will be up-cycling rubbish to create sculptures of the surrounding himalayan mountains. Alex selects from the waste, a can that has features resembling part of a mountain or Valley. He then goes on to shape them more with hammers and finally builds up layers of paint to resemble the unique forms of the landscape such as rivers or waterfalls. The work comments on the fragile nature of the most sublime region of our planet, therefore the work responds to the need for conservation and pollution reduction. By taking the very waste that would other wise be burnt or buried on these mountains and transforming it into something of worth it helps to preserve these very places for future generations.

Firn (/fɪərn/; from Swiss German firn "last year's", cognate with before) is partially compacted névé, a type of snow that has been left over from past seasons and has been recrystallized into a substance denser than névé. It is ice that is at an intermediate stage between snow and glacial ice. Firn has the appearance of wet sugar, but has a hardness that makes it extremely resistant to shovelling. Its density generally ranges from 0.35 g/cm³ to 0.9 g/cm³, and it can often be found underneath the snow that accumulates at the head of a glacier.

Snowflakes are compressed under the weight of the overlying snowpack. Individual crystals near the melting point are semiliquid and slick, allowing them to glide along other crystal planes and to fill in the spaces between them, increasing the ice's density. Where the crystals touch they bond together, squeezing the air between them to the surface or into bubbles.

In the summer months, the crystal metamorphosis can occur more rapidly because of water percolation between the crystals. By summer's end, the result is firn. The minimum altitude that firn accumulates on a glacier is called the firn limit, firn line or snowline.