Friday, February 23, 2007

Ice-Carving in St. Joseph

An icy wind was whipping off Lake Michigan all day Saturday, but the heart of downtown St. Joseph was a-buzz anyway, with red-nosed people packing the sidewalks despite the cold.

What had drawn these hardy folks—and me, too—to don wooly hats and scarves and brave the outdoors was the chance to watch art being made before our very eyes.  From mute, blank blocks of ice, ice-sculptors raise glittering visions of beauty as brittle and ephemeral as snowflakes. On these modest streets, during St. Joseph’s Magical Ice-Carving Festival, we would witness the passion of artistic creation, the struggle between vaunting human ambition and recalcitrant matter.

After the cold, what I notice first is the whine of power-tools in the streets.  Every ice-carver has a work-bench with a colourful tangle of electrical cables supplying an array of power-drills and sanders.  The work stations look like a disaster waiting to happen:  guys slide around ankle deep in slush, wielding chainsaws in their sodden mittens.  A sculptor cradles a chunk of ice, as slippery as a fish, against his chest and chisels in the details.

In ice-carving, it seems, art for art’s sake is tempered with elements of manly competitive sport.  One guy gestures at his loaded workbench with a grin: “It’s all about the toys,” he says.  The sculptors undertake elaborate and technically demanding projects in a race against the clock and each other.  The race is a white-knuckle marathon of stamina and nerves:  five tense hours in the freezing cold build to a dramatic finale.

In the first hours, the main forms of a sculpture are roughed out from rectangular blocks of ice with a few assertive strokes of an 18 inch chainsaw.  The basic armature of the sculpture is assembled: a torso, a plinth, a mountain top for an eagle to perch on.  You can’t always tell what the sculpture will be until the very last touches: an awkward looking bench transforms into a soaring eagle, as blanks of ice are scalloped into feathers and a beak is chipped out.

Warming up in a snug cafe, we watch as a sculptor crenellates his ice-castle outside.  Through the steamy window, we catalogue the sculptures.  Tropical beasts predominate over northern fauna:  there’s a six-foot giraffe, a menacing scorpion, an enormous sparkling angelfish.  A bevy of bare-breasted mermaids swims along Main Street in a wind chill that would flake your gills right off.  By the snowy fire hydrant, a Bengal tiger snarls at a rearing cobra in a snapshot from the Jungle Book.

Outside, the judges are shouting, “Ten more minutes, ten more minutes,” and the competitors speed up.  We join the crowd gathered around a sculptor who is about to suture the right arm to his ice-skating giantess.  He heats a metal plate with a domestic iron, holds the plate against her shoulder stump, then clamps the ice arm against the melted site.  Gingerly, he releases his grip:  Will the ice hold?  We all hold our breath .... the arm stays put.  The crowd exhales and we move on.

We count down with the judges at the next site, my favourite piece.  It’s a giant wasp, perfectly precise in every detail from the delicate veins in its wings to the venomous arc of its sting.  The carver is fussing over final touches, drilling conical indentations for compound eyes, and refining the planes of the wings.  I’m aghast when he picks up a propane torch and directs its flame on his creation.  “What is he doing?” I hiss.  Flames flicker through the prisms of the wasp’s icybody.  “Please don’t let him melt off the antennae!” I mutter.

The judges shout. “Step away from your work!” and a transformation is revealed.  All the opaque shavings of ice have melted away.  The work is as clear as crystal, art on the sidewalk.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on February 23, 2007
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