Carving a massive block of packed snow into an elegant sculpture presents all sorts of challenges. It's even tougher when the goal is an intricate mathematical shape with a gravity-defying heart.
A Twist in Time. Photo by Stan Wagon
This was the fourth time that Wagon had entered a team in the contest. The 2002 squad included competition veterans Dan Schwalbe and John Bruning. Ski instructor Rob Nachtwey served as team photographer, videographer, and webmaster.
Snow-sculpting team members: John Bruning, Dan Schwalbe, Stan Wagon, Bathsheba Grossman, Rob Nachtwey.
The event represented Grossman's first venture into snow as a sculpting medium. In the late 1980s, when Grossman was an undergraduate studying mathematics, she had found herself wanting to step from thinking about geometric abstractions to working with physical objects.
Sculpture showed her the way, and she ended up studying art with sculptor Robert Engman (see "Triune Twists") at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in the early 1990s.
Eltanin by Bathsheba Grossman. On display at the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Photo by I. Peterson.
After leaving university, Grossman began designing her sculptures on a computer, using computer-aided design software. She employed rapid-prototyping technology to convert a design into a physical model, built up layer by layer into the full three-dimensional figure.
Usually the model was made from wax, resin-impregnated starch, or plastic. To create a metal casting of the sculpture, she typically turned to the ancient lost-wax method, which destroys the model and mold to leave a metal sculpture.
"So the process moves, as it were, backward in time: from virtual idea to hand-finished metal," Grossman noted (see "Flame Alpha," "Soliton," "Intersecting Tetrahedra with a Twist," and "Chiralized Tetrahedron").
A bronze sculpture created by Grossman served as the model for the Wagon team's Breckenridge snow-sculpting effort. Called Spancel II, the original was only 5 inches tall.
Spancel II by Bathsheba Grossman.
This sculpture had an intriguing, rarely encountered symmetry, featuring 180-degree rotations around three axes and no reflections. "I can't think of a familiar object that has it," Grossman remarked.
Initially, Grossman wasn't confident that her sculpture—with its open structure and strongly curved edges and surfaces—could be scaled up and successfully fashioned out of snow. However, her teammates assured her that "snow is very strong."
The final version, which Grossman dubbed A Twist in Time, was 12 feet high. It remained standing even a week after the competition. "Our sculpture here was by far the hardest and riskiest of any," Wagon commented. See Wagon's event diary.
"The event was especially exciting for me because…I've done very little work at large scales," Grossman said. "Prototyping technology tends to keep me inside an 8-inch box, so it was very liberating and educational to see the design so huge."
The 2002 championship trophy went to a whimsical sculpture of a bass-playing musician, created by a team from Canada. A Twist in Time earned an honorable mention for "expressive impact" and tied for second in voting by spectators.
Grossman came away with a new appreciation of snow as an artistic medium. "As carving media go, I like it," she said. "It cuts reasonably easily with a sharp shovel, but it gives enough resistance to cut pure curves, unlike soft media such as soap or clay."
While making A Twist in Time, the snow sculptors noticed that Grossman's piece can be viewed as the first two stages of an infinitely nested form—a three-dimensional fractal. Digging deeper into this structure to unveil additional levels of intricacy may be a fruitful avenue of artistic exploration.
See also "Minimal Snow," "A Minimal Winter's Tale," "White Narcissus." "Whirled White Way," "Turning a Snowball Inside Out," and "Knot Divided in Snow."
Originally posted February 18, 2002
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