Melting ice on Canary Wharf - ice sculpture

I am returning to document my sand and ice sculptures after a few posts about other things. As they say, 'A change is as good as a break'. These posts take me a day or two to put together, from organising photos to pondering what I'll write about to then battling the keyboard to try and make some sort of readable presentation. It takes a lot of energy for me with all else going on in my life. Hence the reason I don't post as often as I would like.

Where were we?

I am now in 2014 having so far created posts for all my work from 1996 to 2013. I find it a pity that I have to kick 2014 off with this project but this is the luck of the draw and It needs writing about even though my images are not the best and it may not have been the most interesting of projects.

London baby!

It took place over a weekend in early January. Niall Magee asked if I wanted to team up on a little competition where we needed to create three separate sculptures, 1 solo and then two as a team. It happened in Canary Wharf, London. and the weather was great, too great!

Working with ice is best done in minus temperatures for obvious reasons, but you just can't rely on the weather these days due to climate change.

It was a small project with a participation fee to cover costs. I figured what the hell, it could be fun and I would get to check out this part of London and maybe meet some new people to annoy with my friendship.

The NSA

For my solo piece made from one block of ice, I had high aspirations to create a spider in a web. The Web represented the internet, the spider the NSA (Naughty spying Asshats) In 2013 Edward Snowden had proved what all the tinfoil hat wearers had been saying. That the US government was spying on everyone and he exposed the tools and techniques they were using.

This was very present in my mind and I was wondering how it's exposure would change the world. Spoiler alert 'It hasn't!' I am sure they are still grabbing all our data and hopefully the asshats are reading this post now. Hi guys, how about an upvote for my data?

The Warm temperatures made the sculpture very difficult for me and It was melting as fast as I could carve. You may be able to make out something in the image but I will forgive you if you don't.

Ship in a bottle

For our second piece, which was a double from one small block of ice we thought to make a ship in a bottle. Niall would make the bottle and I would try to make a ship inside of it from the ice cut away from around the neck.

Again with the plus temperatures, it was very difficult. Niall did a nice job of the bottle by creating two separate halves which he hollowed out. These we then reassembled around the ship. My ship looked OK for a few minutes before one of the masts fell over and we could not get back in to fix it.

I am really impressed by what the real ship in bottle builders can do, especially when you think that everything has to be done through the mouth of the bottle. Even with our cheating half bottle, we couldn't get it right and I have no photos to prove it.

She's a model and she's looking bad

Our final piece was made from much larger blocks of ice. I think the organisers had set a theme of Fashion and so we did something with a model (On the left side and her hair transforming into a spiral of photographic film in an arch-like structure.

One of the side effects of working in plus temperatures and in direct sunlight is that the UV light shatters the structure and creates bubbles and fissures all the way through. This takes away all clarity from the sculpture and can make a lacklustre sculpture like ours look even more lacklustre.

It wasn't a great piece but we had fun and had some good times in the evening with the other carvers. There were many carvers there that I had not met before. Most were purely commercial carvers, Highly skilled but they never really worked in the same circles on the more artistic projects around Europe and the world.

So hat was that. my next sculpture should be a bit more interesting, I hope. Please stick with me.