A smooth glass animal rested atop a platform in the Ithaca Commons. It was a chilly night in December and people pulled their coats tighter around them, preparing for another chilly gust of wind.
The animal was a dog perched atop a pedestal—except it wasn’t made of glass. The dog was made of ice, its exterior melted away by a blow torch so that it glistened in a shiny wet coat. A man stood behind his creation, still holding a chainsaw.
That’s right—a chainsaw.
This past weekend, Ithaca’s tenth annual Ice Festival took place in the Commons, coaxing Ithacans out of the comfort of their heated homes. Ice sculptors from all around the United States came to participate in the events, and before a crowd of people, the artists carved giraffes, dogs, dragons and guitars out of square blocks of ice.
For the speed competition, two contestants faced off against each other, with only twenty minutes to create an icy masterpiece. Each artist brought their block to life, first by carving and then, at the last minute, blow torching the sculptures so they melted ever so slightly, the extra frost falling away. Torching the sculptures leaves them glistening so the intricate details of each sculpture are clearly visible.
Rich Daly, from Long Island, has been sculpting for fifteen years. Similar to other sculptors, Daly got involved with ice carving because he was required to take a class in culinary school. But what started out as a required course quickly became a passion. He has won Ithaca’s Ice Festival four times and is the current United States National Champion from 2015 and 2016. He broke the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest ice carving which boiled down to no less than 61 carvings in two hours and 52 minutes. That’s 18,000 pounds of ice.
For the speed competition, Daly carved a dragon with flames coming out of its mouth.
“People like things with a lot of detail,” he explained. “It doesn’t have to be the best carving as long as it glistens in the light.”
Aaron Costic from Cleveland, Ohio, similarly got his start ice sculpting in a food art class at the culinary school at the University of Akrin. For the carve and deliver competition, he planned to create a woman in motion called Transcend, and for the two-block showpiece challenge, he carved an Orchid.
Costic has been practicing ice sculpting for 27 years, a talent that has taken him all over the world, to places like China and Monaco. He attended the Prince of Monaco’s wedding because he was recruited, along with other ice carvers around the world, to sculpt a variety of animal sculptures for the wedding. Because the prince was marrying a woman from South Africa, the team created African Animals: panthers, lions, elephants and giraffes.
“[I like] the immediacy of it,” Costic said. “I can do something out of ice that would take five or six months to do. It catches the refractive angles of the light,” he said, looking out over the platform where two new ice carvers were getting ready to compete.
The carvers all know each other. Many of them attend ten plus ice-carving events each year.
“It’s a big family,” says Kaitlin Pfropper, who has been creating ice sculptures for four years. “I like that aspect of it. Everybody is very sharing of what they do.”
Even in the most competitive part of the competition, where carvers use two blocks of ice to create a sculpture in four hours, they offered to help each other—and even joke around—as the final minutes ticked by.
“Five minutes left!” Costic shouted.
“I thought there were fifteen minutes left?” a spectator asked.
“There are. I’m just joking around with him,” Costic said, pointing to Daly at a nearby station.
The Commons were smattered with tents, ice boxes and sculptors scurrying around, chipping off ice from this side of their sculpture, dusting off frost from the other. Judges prepared to evaluate each of the eight sculptures from the eight people left in the competition and pedestrians oohed and ahhed at the almost-finished products.
Of course there was Costic’s towering Orchid, its petals simultaneously fragile-looking and sturdy, for which he later won the Ice Fest competition. Other striking pieces included a sharp-beaked parrot lifting off of a tree trunk, a jack-in-the-box, a fish with exposed bones and Daly’s majestic-looking shrimp. The parrot’s wings stretched out from his sides, head tilted down with an impressive curved beak, reminiscent of the form an Eagle would take when landing or taking flight. The shrimp’s legs reached out from beneath itself, so sharp they almost looked like the stingers of a scorpion.
And Kaitlyn Pfropper’s fish had a dead, angry look in its eyes, staring out over the commons. The fish had a tail, upper body and head, but the middle section of it was stripped down to the bone. She titled it “The Walking Swimming Dead.”
“I’ve been on a fish kick and I wanted to do something different,” said Pfropper. “I like doing abstract and realist stuff.”
This was Pfropper’s first time competing in the Ithaca Ice Festival. At 23 years, she was one of the youngest competitors, and also the only woman competing in the final eight of the competition.
“I think maybe because tools are more in association with guys,” she said. “But girls are just as artistic as guys. I love using the power tools."
A smattering of cheers rang through the Commons at 6:10 p.m. on Saturday as one of the carvers finished off his sculpture. Other carvers melted their creations down with blow torches, giving them the glistening wet effect.
“It’s a whole different type of art,” Pfropper explains. “It’s bittersweet because it doesn’t last.”
The carvers packed up their tools, some with helpers, some alone. They wheeled their ice boxes off the Commons, leaving the judges to peruse around the frozen creations, which in the twenty-degree weather, remained in perfect form. Spectators milled around, gazing at the various ice statues.
But the carvers left their gems behind to attend a dinner together. They soon packed up and left town, until they see each other at the next competition, where many more fantastic beasts will come alive and life-like flowers will sprout, seemingly from the gloves of their creators.
