Ice Sculpture

One of my first workshops in Finland was ice sculpture. As a whole the experience was great, but much of the process drove me crazy. We were bound by corporate sponsorship so right from the start we had stunted creative freedom. Add to that the thrill of working with a new material and I was off balance pretty much the whole time.

The first workday arrived and we received our material. Due to an exceptionally late winter all the ice was man made instead of bits from the lake. What this translate to is ice that is foggier and shaped funny. We had to adjust all of our measurements and reshape several blocks.Fortunately ice is a surprisingly easy material to work with and we made quick work of the set back.

Our sponsor was a local bank so we decided to make to an exaggerated safe. I was feeling a bit steampunk at the time so I was really excited to carved a whole bunch of random gears and machinery parts. Our initial design detailed a safe that was 2 meters high and offered the possibility for people to poke their head inside. As with all public work, safety had to be considered so a down scale was necessary. To compensate for the extra blocks of ice one of my teammates suggested we make a herd of children's banks to accompany the adult bank. Naturally I thought they meant the common piggy banks, however in Finland for whatever reason piggy banks are hippo banks. So we got to work on making an army of hippos surrounding a larger safe box.In the above picture you can see our first prototype. To emphasis the Finnish aspect of the work even further one girl thought it would be nice to fill one hippo bank with Finnish berries.

The finished work was lit from within the safe box and the under the leading berry hippo bank. Due to time constraints, I did not achieve the level of detail I was hoping for, but it was a successful project none the less. I discovered that I really enjoyed working with ice. It allows me to indulge my desire for large scale sculpture without the consequence of what to do with it after. Ice melts and there is not much you can do about that, but for at least a little while it was shaped into meaning something a bit more.