We’ve met up several times over the last few weeks to try and decide on our sculpture designs. We need two; one for the University Competition and one for the International Competition. The University one is first so we decided to do the slightly simpler design for that, knowing that we’ll probably learn a lot from this that we can take into the second competition for the more complicated design. It’s taken us a long while to finalise our designs and we seemed to be going round in circles at times! The second competition is the International one which professional ice sculptors compete in. Because our sculpture won’t be as good as others in terms of skill (they’ve had years of practice!) we decided it was best to go for designs that had a strong message behind them.
When we compared our individual designs we’d all tried to communicate global issues. We finally settled on the two designs below. For the University competition we decided on ‘The Antithesis’. A dripping tap alone wastes roughly 18,000 litres of water a year and yet nearly one tenth of the world’s population doesn’t have access to safe water. These statistics are shocking! This is what we wanted to convey in our design. At a glance both the front and back of the design illustrate a similar scenario; a tap and bucket. However, upon closer inspection you can see that they’re very different.
One side depicts a curved wall with 4 Greek columns and a tap with water flowing into a bucket. The tap has been left on and bucket is overflowing. The opposite side portrays an old stone wall that’s starting to fall down and an old wooden bucket. The tap above this bucket has no water running out of it. It’s clear that this scene is from a very different world to the other. We aimed to illustrate the polar opposites; how the wealthy have and waste so much without giving it a second thought whilst there are parts of the world struggling without.
Our second design ‘Time for Change’ aims to illustrate the destructive effect humanity has on the planet through global warming. It depicts a globe that is melting being held up by a hand. The melting represents global warming and the destructive effect that this is having on the earth – it’s quite literally melting! The addition of the hand represents that it’s humanity that has caused this. The way that the globe is melting onto the hand indicates that the effects of this will (eventually, if not yet) be felt by humanity. The hand is surrounded by power stations and is engulfed in smoke further landing the blame on humanity. However the way the hand is lifting the globe slightly above the smoke also gives hope; there is a way out, but it is down to us to change and make it happen.
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We did realise that the fact these sculptures are being carved into large blocks of ice is a little ironic…