Ice sculpture is one of the most difficult things to photograph. Being frozen water, it has that whole transparency thing going on that makes all form and sense of scale not really translate in images. Mostly, I just try my best at the end of a project to grab some pics, but with this project, I discovered that I had a lot of images taken on my phone as I worked on the sculpture. Looking at them now, I think they help give a good understanding of the sculpture and will also show my work process for those interested.
This piece was created in a big theme park in Germany called Europa- Park. I was tasked with this area of the project by myself, which suited me fine as I could just put on my headphones and get lost in the work without having to communicate with anyone.
With these bigger events, all pieces create part of a story, so I had to keep within certain design guidelines and not go too crazy. There was a sketch by the art lead, but that was more to help with the stacking of ice blocks and to give some ideas. I looked at it and then put it away. I knew the mission.
The ice was stacked in position by a separate team before I arrived. Each block is around a tonne in weight, so they use forklifts and other lifting equipment. Then stick everything together with water. I'm glad I can avoid this, but sometimes I need to do a bit of restacking myself to make it suit my composition.
The first day is a bit like a game of Tetris as manageable blocks are moved around. I had some spare ice that I could donate to the Russian carver Marina for her project.
I quickly roughed out the body arching section with my electric chainsaw and ice chisels. Nice to start with something simple, to get back into the process and to give my mind time to compute my overall design.
Working with slippery ice can be dangerous, especially as you have really sharp tools and chainsaws waving around. I take safety seriously and try my best to make my space comfortable to work in. With such a big sculpture, reaching all areas is difficult. I tried a scaffold, but I just couldn't access everything from the platform. Climbing up and down was also a pain. So I acquired a scissors lift.
This meant I could just move around at the push of a button and get to all those hard-to-reach areas. The requirements for the design was to have the dragon as part of some kind of block (I can't remember why exactly)
I thought it might be interesting to try to make it appear like he was half in and half out of the block. The viewer side would have a positive carving and on the back, I would do a negative neck.
This kind of approach is difficult, as you have to keep coming around the other side to make sure everything lines up. As a glutton for punishment, these are the difficulties I enjoy the most, so I got to work.
Each morning when I return to work the ice has melted a slight bit and all the tool marks are buffed away. I really enjoy this when working with ice. It is like the material is giving you a helping hand or the ice fairies are helping you along during the night.
Once I had the main form carved in, I made the scales, again, positive at the front and negative at the back.
I think the optical effect worked well and the whole neck had a nice 3-dimensional sweep to it as if it was separate from the block.
Now for the part which I hadn't given much thought to. How to tie the whole thing together. Luckily, my friend Martijn had finished his project and was sent to help clean up my mess. We had been working together making an igloo hotel in Davos for a few years and enjoy coming up with crazy ideas together.
Overall, my sculpture was very organic-looking with three distinct elements Head, body and tail. So, as a contrast, we decided to do the whole base which would join the parts together as something very different and making use of all the leftover snow we could find around the exhibition tent.
We cut everything into different-sized cubes and started stacking. We just kept going till we ran out of snow.
The blocks were placed at a slight angle to add some movement and buckets of water splashed over them to fuse everything.
Piece by piece, everything started coming together, creating an interesting motif like pixelated waves or fire.
As we were finishing the lighting guys started their work. I enjoy giving them some ideas and advice on what I think will look good.
Sometimes they go a bit crazy with the lights and have to be told to hold their horses. You need to balance the light with other sculptures around your own. It helps with the eyes and joins everything together.
The translucency of the snow makes it glow with hidden lights and that is what I suggested for the blocks.
The main reason for the difficulty of photography is all of the lights and dark background curtains. To the eye everything looked much better but I hope with this post you get a good overall impression.
It was a fun project and we all had a jolly good laugh.
