THUNDER BAY - When your artistic medium is snow and ice, it’s important that you enjoy the experience of creating, rather than reveling in the final product.
For sculptors participating in this year’s snow sculpture competition at Prince Arthur’s Landing for the 2017 Snowday celebrations, the unseasonably high temperatures were wreaking havoc with their art.
“We started on Thursday,” said Michel Chouinard, one of sculptors. “Thursday was the best day because it was around minus 18, but the next day it started warming up and it was really hard to do it.
We managed to keep it intact for three days, but today it looks like it’s going to go and turn into water. But everybody was in the same boat. I loved the experience.”
The theme of this year’s competition was Canada’s 150th anniversary celebration. Chouinard and his wife, Lily, wanted to celebrate Canada’s upcoming anniversary by showing its strength.
“The theme for ours is 150 strong,” Lily Chouinard said. “You have the momma bear and the baby bear and we have to all look after each other. We built a nice strong wall. On the other side, the wall is made to be crumbling down because if we don’t have the togetherness as Canadians, we might crumble.”
Other sculptures throughout the park paid homage to Canada, from massive locomotives, to maple syrup. And it wasn’t just the professionals getting in on the action.
Judi Vinni, of Willow Springs Creative Centre, spent her Snowday teaching kids the fine art of sculpting with snow, a lesson that was tough to teach when the materials didn’t want to cooperate.
“It’s great that there’s so many people out and that people are not cold, but it’s really awful snow,” she said. “I feel bad for all the competitive carvers.”
More than 90 kids stopped by to help Vinni sculpt a snow cake for Canada’s 150th anniversary, and even some grownups stopped by to lend a hand.
“We just had a woman who just spent an hour with us,” she said. “You could see that she just became a child again and she had never done it before and was waiting to go home and make her own snow blocks.”
Vinni has competed in the snow sculpture competition for the last three years with the Willow Springs Creative Centre, but this year she decided to take a break, which she said was a good idea given how challenging it has been for the sculptors.
For Chouinard, who is used to working with wood sculptures, seeing his creation slowly melting back to the ground doesn’t really bother him too much.
“Seeing the kids smile, that was the big thing for me this weekend,” he said.
