Featured Image: Black Label Productions
In support of the Share Winter Foundation, Rossignol, artist Ya La’Ford and student Andre Thomas have teamed up to create a limited-edition ski you gotta see. This one-of-a-kind stick aims to increase participation and expand diversity in outdoor sports. Built on Rossi’s best-selling Sender 90 Pro, it blurs the boundaries between frontside and freeride and opens the door to play and carve across the mountain. Best part is, all sales proceeds of this ski will be donated to the Share Winter Foundation. We sat down with La’Ford to break down the collab and her creative process.
What sparked your interest in joining forces with Rossignol and Share Winter Foundation?
The idea of working with Rossignol and the Share Winter Foundation represents an exciting innovative alliance that redefines the boundaries between art, adventure and diversity in the outdoors, resulting in the creation of a one-of-a-kind Sender 90 Pro Ski. Both Rossignol and Share Winter are iconic, high-performance organizations with a forward-thinking focus on innovation, community building and creative expression, which adds new dimensions of civic consensus, vibrancy and cultural identity to local boundaries and the world beyond. The ability to create this unique ski adds value to the human journey as the Share Winter Foundation will be empowered to improve the life experiences of so many kids through ski and ride programs in the future.
What does it mean to be able to work with a student from your hometown to design the topsheets?
There’s no place like the Bronx! It was great to experience the energy and absorb the creativity of being in New York to design and develop the top sheets. It was also great working with Andre, a bright and talented student rooted in the Bronx. Our collaboration is a celebration of self-expression and how personal narratives, and cultural influences shaped the artistic process. While the Bronx is primed as a vibrant cityscape, for this project, we wanted to focus on a “canvas of snow” or the feeling of being on a mountainscape. The idea of using abstract mountain formations with a geometric overlay aimed to remind us of the infinite possibilities that can arise from the intersection of art, skiing and the human quest for adventure.
Rossignol Sender 90 Pro Share Winter XP
Lengths: 130, 140, 150, 160, 170, 180 cm
DIM: 118-90-108 mm
Radius: 19 m @ 160 cm
Your art is so unique yet universally enjoyable. How did you and Andre land on this specific design? What rounds of edits did you go through together?
For me, the mission of creating art and community experiences exists to immeasurably transform and revolutionize the social, cultural and historical contexts of creative expression within the human journey. Every community is defined by a measure of creativity and is weighed against a backdrop of how art can mobilize citizens to challenge conventional thinking and understand the intrinsic value of exercising creative license within their communities. The idea of achieving this for as many youths as possible is a lifelong treasure. It was truly a great experience, and Andre and I shared good creative chemistry as we first wanted to design the ski around a concept that would allow each person to elevate their aesthetic experience on the mountain. Our storyboard evolved through several iterations, one of which focused on using a single word to fill the ski’s surface, but through trial and discovery, we returned to an abstract aesthetic that we hoped would have universal appeal and perhaps reach an audience new to winter sports.
Have you ever designed a topsheet before? What was this process like for you creatively?
No. Designing a limited-edition top sheet presented a unique opportunity to blend art with winter sports. My body of work primarily focuses on geometric patterns, and so I wanted to ensure the design incorporated colors, shapes and patterns that would allow each curve and contour to tell a unique story. It is a story where art meets the slopes, where all imaginations have no limits and only possibilities. Working with the Rossignol, The Share Winter Foundation and Andre was a rewarding experience and like most of my art projects, I first like to conduct research and develop historical and anthropological context along with the ability to visit and meditate within the creative space. It was both exciting and important to be able to ski during the design process to incorporate the feeling of what it means to navigate a ski slope and how doing this added immense value to the creative process. So really, the geometric pattern included in the design reflects the marks, snow carvings and pathways traversing the slopes created during a ski experience.
In your words, what’s the goal of this collaboration?
I learned so much about the power of winter sports through this process, and it is my hope this unique collaboration will inspire youth from all walks of life to journey beyond their current space to experience new ski and ride winter sports and to visit mountain spaces. It embraces the idea that you enter the mountainscape, navigate the slopes, carving new uncharted paths to advance as a new, evolved, refined and elevated person. Life is different from this point forward. The experience of the mountainscape can elevate your thinking, choices, options and opportunities as your new abilities and talents can be shared with your community, nation, and the world beyond.
