Ross Baisas, from the Philippines, chips away on his ice sculpture, Lady Hopper, for which he won first place in the singles category in the Winterlude ice carving competion as well as the Public Choice Award.
A cellist plays a silent harmony for his audience as King Kong reaches up to drag down a perilous plane. Barbarians battle in a frozen encounter as Toll Collector advances toward them with sickle raised. The Butterfly Beauty looks away as it all becomes too much.
This is the stuff that dreams are made of, and it is brought to life at Ottawa’s Winterlude festival through the work of the ice-carvers at the annual Rogers International Ice-Carving Competition.
Equipped with chisels, picks and saws, ice sculptors from around the world come to Confederation Park to compete. But if their sculptures are the beauty, then the job requirements of their trade surely are the beast.
Ice-sculpting events are held in sub-zero temperatures to keep the sculptures from melting. Competitions like Winterlude’s last for around 29 hours and are held outside come rain, snow or sunshine.
Ross Baisas, an ice-sculptor for 10 years, is hidden under countless layers of clothes, including a bulging ski-jacket, a large fur hat, and olive-green rubber gloves he hopes are thick enough to keep frostbite out.
Baisas says that working with sharp machinery makes this a dangerous art form, but the pride he feels when he finishes a sculpture makes the process worthwhile.
“We’re here because this is our passion to do this, this [work] doesn’t give us a hard time,” he says. “We love this job.”
For anyone who is looking to dabble in the art of ice-carving, watermelons and wood are a good way to start.
“You’ll find that probably 90 per cent of ice sculptors are chefs,” says Corby Pearce, a sculptor for around 10 years.
“If you’re lucky enough to have a head chef that does carve ice, then he teaches you everything you know. You just push yourself to learn more, and do more.”
The work doesn’t stop when the weather warms up, so there really isn’t much downtime for the working ice-sculptor. Because of their limited lifetime ice-sculptures are in high demand for extravagant or special events like weddings.
Baisas and Pearce both agree that while they may have started carving as a hobby, it quickly turned into a full-time profession.
Lesley Mayfield, one of eight members of the Canadian Snow Sculpture Team, says that when demand for ice-sculptures is low, many carvers sculpt sand, and plenty of overtime goes into planning for future jobs.
“Snow and ice sculptors schedule their winter work around the competitions they want to enter and any winter festivals or promotions at which they have contracted work,” explains Mayfield. “The winter schedule is usually worked out by late summer or fall.”
Many sculptures at Winterlude tower over the spectators and the intricacy of the carvings may seem impossible to achieve for any prospective ice-carver. But these sculptors all agree that anybody can do it.
“It’s easy to do, but hard to do well,” Pearce says, but “anyone can do this.”
Mayfield agrees: “It’s a very interesting mind exercise for anyone, as we usually think of making things by building up, but in this case you have to imagine the figure as hidden within, while you remove the extra mass.”
The enemy of the ice carver is heat. Sculptures cannot be maintained long after the event so they are knocked to the ground. In a park filled with figures of fantasy, one can’t help but think of Dorothy’s dream in the Wizard of Oz when considering their fate.
The life of the Butterfly Beauty is over. Her angelic crystal features melt into an agonizing glower and she appears to scream just like the Wicked Witch of the West: “I’m melting! Melting! Oh, what a world, what a world!”