Here's a little Motivational tip to start your day. Don't let anyone tell you what can or can't be done. If you believe you can make it happen just go for it and trust you can make it So. Ok, I'll probably never be a motivational speaker but this is a thing I truly believe and hope others will trust in themselves, especially if they get a crazy idea into their head.
How else are we to create new things or find our own limits. The risk of failure will be there, of course, though that can be easily overcome if you put in the work and believe.
What am I talking about
Case in point, This was a sculpture for the 2005 Oberhausen ice sculpture festival and the theme was the Christmas story. Niall Magee and I were asked to make this entrance arch based on the scene of 'The Annunciation'. This is where Mary was told by the archangel Gabriel that she would be up the duff with the son of God.
I thought it would be really cool if I could somehow manage to have Gabriel floating above Mary as if he was weightless. Ice of course can not defy the laws of gravity but I was sure there was a way. And so began the firing of neurons in my gray matter. Maybe I could carve him in negative form and have this negative form appear as a ghost floating inside the ice.
Credit where it is due
I had seen some other sculptors experimenting with negative carving in Jelgava, latvia the year before. It was a father son team and they had made a simple stack of blocks representing a fridge. Inside the blocks they had hollowed out the form of bottles, a cake and other bits and pieces. I really thought it was a great effect but I wanted to bring it on a step and try and make an entire figure. Although this team for Lithuania's sculpture was not the most beautiful, the concept was great and had wormed it's way into my subconscious giving me new things think and experiment with.
I explained to Niall my idea. He knows that I can be like a dog with a bone so said go ahead but trying to convince the artistic leader of the project was another matter. Anique Kuizenga didn't believe I could pull it off and that due to the importance of the piece in the whole exhibition wanted me to do some more straight forward, middle of the road kind of affair which was not risk taking.
I told her I would do a small demo example for her in a small block of ice to show her what I was hoping to achieve. I made a small negative face in some ice and to be honest I really found it difficult to make it look in anyway good. I presented it to her and she wasn't too impressed
Luckily Niall and Anique had been going out for a while so we had to use Nialls relationship influence on her to let me give it a go. Finally, with lots of cajoling she agreed but ' It better be good'
Now for the easy part
I really didn't realise how hard it would be to carve in this way. I had to relearn everything I knew about creating form. It all had to be flipped in my mind and I was carving pretty much blind. The position of the figure required that I had to work on a scissors lift platform which meant I needed to go up and down hundreds of times so that I could go to the front of the sculpture to see if what I was doing was making sense. I would go back up and make small changes and them come back down again to see the difference. I must have covered a hundred miles to make this sculpture.
It was really difficult to remember if I had to cut away ice or just leave it. Any mistake would mean the whole thing would be ruined. There were no second chances bar removing all of the ice to a flat plain and starting again. It was very slow and tedious work but, I started to get the hang of it. In my head. I broke the figure down into balls that I would hollow out at different depths. These would then be joined together with hollow cylinders to give a matchstick man like figure and from this I could push further in to create the face, muscles and and other elements.
I added two wing tips above the sculpture with would hopefully line up and make a transition between negative and positive figure, an experiment on top of the feature experiment , if you will.
Hiding the seams
Each of these blocks of ice is 2 meters by 1 meter in size and of course where the blocks join these is a line which is hard to get rid of visually so I tried to place the figure so that I could hide these lines in clouds made from snow. These were first negatively carved into the Ice to give the snow form volume inside and then snow powder was mixed with water and built up. Niall and I took ages to do this step and the ice at the front was completely covered with drips of frozen water. While I started to smooth back the ice to a flat glass like finish Niall Made Mary in the front in 3D positive just below the reaching out hand of Gabriel.
It was difficult to know if all would come together till the very end when the ice as cleaned to make it disappear. I'll let you be the judge if it worked or not but for me I was very happy with the result and very proud when I saw other amazing sculptors from Russia that work as professors in Colleges over there come over and try and get a handle on what we had achieved. Then here and there around the exhibition they tried to emulate the effect.
Anique was happy also and I believe she now trusts me a bit more with my crazy ideas. From then on in nearly every project there is now a sculpture which is created just to use the effect and if I am not the one to make it I will always be asked for advice on how the hell to do.
Lighting is everything
Getting the lighting right was very important and it was amazing how different the piece looked with different positions and colours. For me I am still not crazy about the funky colour lighting they use on these large exhibitions but I think they did a good job here.
So, that's it. Although a challenging piece to make I really felt like I broke new ground and had started to use the ice for what it was good for. Using its optical quality and pushing myself to the limits of what I could achieve with it. I was definitely looking forward to experimenting with this technique again.
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.
Mice in the cupboard - ice sculpture
What to make? - sand sculpture
Heaven and Hell - sand sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite