It has not been a good week! I'd avoided the seasonal scourges of colds, flu, norovirus that seem to have been bouncing around since New Year, but over the last few days I've gone down with some nasty bug that has left me with a running nose, a hacking cough, sore ribs, feeling chilly and with no energy. I did wonder if it's Covid, but I have no tester kits left, so I've just been keeping out of people's way, drinking soup, spending much of my time in bed. I hope I'm over the worst of it now.
I've not felt like reading or writing much, but I have listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell. Her Archive Series volume 4 was a birthday present last month and it's got a lot of cold, snow and ice on it (the Hejira period, if you know your Joni), which has maybe influenced me in my decision to go for a literal interpretation of this week's theme of artifice... art-if-ice. (Get it?)
Welcome to the wonderful world of ice sculpting. I had seen ice sculptures as table centre-pieces at posh dinners but never gave much thought to how they were created, and certainly hadn't realised that creating them had been elevated to the status of international competitions at ice-sculpting festivals.
It appears that many of the leading exponents of ice sculpting developed their ice carving skills in the kitchens of top restaurants or now teach such skills in catering colleges, as well as going out on the competition trail.
If you're intrigued, here's a link to a really excellent ten minute video in which Shintaro Okamoto explains and demonstrates both the basics and the finer points of ice sculpting.
There's no poem from me, today. I've just not been up to the task. Instead, I'm sharing a witty poem by my friend and fellow Dead Good Poet, David Wilkinson, as it connects with some of the foregoing themes.
Poet In Residence at the Antarctic Poetry Centre
Why me?
You match our present status
in that no one’s heard of your poetry.
Usually we don’t have even one poet,
so you must keep the hallmark cool tone
sustainable in today’s climate.
If I have to, then let me be the whaler poet,
launcher of the knife, portioning off
the pink cut, salt trim and fat, tipping
the larger waste off the side of the boat.
Or let me be the penguin poet,
sometimes staggering across the ground,
others, gracefully gliding through the water
and across smooth surfaces.
Let me not be the oil-driller poet,
all flame and heat, lips to the black,
aware how the oilfield in the evening
is lit like my own desk and carries on burning.
I can take inspiration from Coleridge
for whom the continent was like
a growling beast of icy ledge
and know poetry sales, unlike the mercury
can never dip below zero, though
hopefully they will rise above three.
David Wilkinson
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| winning sculpture at the World Ice Arts Championships in Alaska, 2022 |
I have looked at tons of images of ice sculptures as background research for this blog and for a while I did wonder if they were AI photographs, so incredible do they look, they are all made by craftspeople with an array of tools, some manual (chisels, ice-picks, hand saws, irons) but increasingly there is an array of power tools (chain saws, drills, shaping discs, burr heads, blowtorches) because speed is of the essence - it's a cold enough environment to work in that craftspeople wear warm clothes, gloves and goggles, and if one takes too long, the ice does eventually start to melt.
Crystal clear blocks of ice are the source material and the sculpting process is then reductive and physically demanding, but the results are breath-taking, and sadly ephemeral.
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| work of a Chinese ice sculpting champion |
Staying with the cool stuff, this week there has been a 'major incident' at a remote research station in the Antarctic, an artificial and icy environment to live in, if ever there was one. A member of the South African research team at Sanae IV had gone rogue, physically assaulting fellow scientists. Not as bad, perhaps, as the stabbing that occurred at a Russian Antarctic installation a few years ago, but the "get us out of here" messages that went back to Cape Town were disturbing enough.
The inhabitants of the South African station are remote (4,000 miles from home) and isolated, and they are only a few weeks into their several-months tour of duty. Emergency evacuation plans are being considered if the problem cannot be contained and resolved.
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| South Africa's Sanae IV research station in Antarctica |
It made me think of that brilliant but bleak John Carpenter sci-fi horror movie, The Thing (1982), where scientists at an American Antarctic base discover a crashed alien spaceship that has been buried deep in the ice...only the alien, once disinterred, is still alive and begins to replicate itself by taking over the bodies of the scientists ("Man is the warmest place to hide"), presaging the end of human civilisation. The special effects, for the time, were stunning. So much ice, so much isolation and paranoia, so much artifice. I really must watch it again, sometime.
There's no poem from me, today. I've just not been up to the task. Instead, I'm sharing a witty poem by my friend and fellow Dead Good Poet, David Wilkinson, as it connects with some of the foregoing themes.
Poet In Residence at the Antarctic Poetry Centre
Why me?
You match our present status
in that no one’s heard of your poetry.
Usually we don’t have even one poet,
so you must keep the hallmark cool tone
sustainable in today’s climate.
If I have to, then let me be the whaler poet,
launcher of the knife, portioning off
the pink cut, salt trim and fat, tipping
the larger waste off the side of the boat.
Or let me be the penguin poet,
sometimes staggering across the ground,
others, gracefully gliding through the water
and across smooth surfaces.
Let me not be the oil-driller poet,
all flame and heat, lips to the black,
aware how the oilfield in the evening
is lit like my own desk and carries on burning.
I can take inspiration from Coleridge
for whom the continent was like
a growling beast of icy ledge
and know poetry sales, unlike the mercury
can never dip below zero, though
hopefully they will rise above three.
David Wilkinson
By the way, this is the ice-pick that was used to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.
Thanks for reading, S ;-)
