The Missoulian / March 6, 1999 / Front Page

Cold Cuts

By Sherry Jones

The weather forecast in Fairbanks, Alaska: a high of 5 degrees and a low of minus 25.  But Roger Wing doesn’t mind.  He likes it cold.

   Wing, a University of Montana art student, was set to start carving Monday in the World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks, a weeklong competition pitting sculptors from Russia, China, Finland, England, Japan, the United States, France, Mexico, Sweden – all over the world.

   They come from unlikely corners of the Earth, including, last year, Morocco.  Wing’s Missoula teammate, Paula Payne, snickered when she heard this.  “Sort of like the Jamaican bobsled team in the Olympics,” she said.

   Her sense of humor will come in handy this week, when she’s chipping and sawing and chiseling night and day in a perpetual deepfreeze, in so much clothing she looks – and feels – like the Michelin man.  “The hard part,” Payne said, “is going to be getting used to working with thick gloves on.”

   This will be Payne’s first time carving in the contest, and she’s more excited than apprehensive.  “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said.  “An adventure.”

   It will, in fact, be her first attempt ever at sculpting ice.  Wing, competing for the third time, isn’t daunted.  “I learned to carve ice in a day flat,” he said, “so I think I can show her all the ropes.”

   Wing, 30, first entered the contest much the same way Payne is doing – by invitation.  A friend who works as a chef in Canada took Wing, a wood sculptor, to the event in 1997, and the pair teamed up again in ’98.  This year, the chef won’t be there but Wing will, with Payne and a set of handmade tools and a wax model of the 20-foot-high coral reef scene his team will create.

   A coral fan, immense and delicate; a giant sponge, pocked with holes; an eel agape, showing needle-sharp teeth.  It’s a scene, Wing says, inspired by snorkeling excursions in Montego Bay. 

   He, Payne and two other team members they’ll acquire in Fairbanks will have 5 1/2 days to fashion the creation from twelve 3,000 pound blocks of ice, 54-inch-thick cubes mined from O’Grady Pond.  Free of vegetation and sediment, it’s the purest, cleanest, most perfect ice you can find anywhere.  “Arctic diamonds,” they call it in Fairbanks.

   For more than five days Wing’s team and 19 other four-person teams will sculpt in the multi-block competition, the contest’s big event.  With so much ice and so

little time, the artists work around the clock, stopping infrequently to grab a bite or take short naps.  Not the ideal circumstances for working with power tools, but, hey: “The chain saws keep you alert,” Wing said.

   All the caution in the world can’t completely prevent accidents, though.  Wing had a near-miss last year, when a huge chunk of ice broke off the sculpture he was working on, fell 9 feet, and landed next to him.  “Heads up” is the rule, he says: “You’ve got to be prepared for something 400 pounds and about the size of a refrigerator to fall on you.”

   In his two years of competition, Wing has neither won nor placed.  That probably won’t change this year, he said, or the next, or the next.  He plans to perservere, though, and perhaps be a contender someday.

   It is, for Wing, an affair of the art.

   “I do it because I can,” he said.  “I love sculpture.  I love carving.  And this is a chance to do it in a more extreme, intense environment.”