Probably one of the most important things to get your head around when ice sculpting is the fact that it is transparent. I know, I know it's obvious but using it to your advantage and trying to steer clear of it's limitations can be one of the biggest learning curves.
As you probably know by now most of my work up to this point in time had been working with sand. Form was so important and playing with surface texture and shadows was the way to go. But with ice these things will not always cut the mustard. For instance if I was to make a head out of ice and carve the perfect face then carve a wonderful hair style on the back of the head. The viewer from the front would see all that hair disturbing the face like thousands of prisms and the face would disappear with distortion. You have to think that the block is like a lens and you need to be very selective with detail front and back and the silhouette is more important than form .
This ice sculpture was made along with fellow sculptor Fergus Mulvany all the way back in 2005 for the Jelgava ice festival in Latvia.
There is no real deep and meaningful story behind it. We just wanted to make something that we could both work on together and not be in each others way. Fergus created the figure at the front and I worked on the back of the blocks in a negative carving style, something that I was starting to experiment with. When viewed from the front both of our work came together and didn't distort what the other was doing. An overall composition was then formed. It was great to use the transparency of the ice in the idea.
We had five standard blocks of ice. These are called Clinebells and are a man made ice block from a machine. The ice is crystal clear because of the way it's made. I will explain how in another post. Each of these ice blocks is 20 x 40 x 10 inch and is a standard of the ice sculpture world. Weighing in at 300lbs they are not the easiest things to handle and lift. But some how we managed to stack them on top of each other.
We called it 'Swiss-army man' . I'm sure you can see a resemblance to Leonardo DA Vinci's Vitruvius man drawing. With ours we wanted to give him a few more appendages to make him more useful. A fun idea which I think created a nice iconic image rather than a piece with brooding depths.
Ps
Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.
Muck Baby nativity - sand sculpture
Follow the star - sand sculpture
Follow the Star - ice sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite
[//]:# (!steemitworldmap 56.653935 lat 23.721519 long Swiss army man - ice sculpture 2005 d3scr)