Close encounters of the frozen kind

It’s surrounded by darkness, trapped in a steel enclosure for two days. On the third day, the faint flicker of a filament bulb slowly comes to life as the door opens. Two, four, six hands lift the heavy structure from the freezer and drag it into the open light. The steel is cracked open and the object removed as the chainsaws come to life.

This isn’t the description of some strange abduction or a late-night horror film, but a new facet of Maricopa High School’s culinary program: ice sculpting.

Maricopa High School culinary instructor Nick Lopez came up with the idea of offering ice sculpting to his students a year ago. “Ice sculptures just lend so much to the feel of a fine dining experience,” he said.

Lopez grew up in Michigan and got his start at ice sculpting in high school where he won a gold medal. “We would go to the big Plymouth ice-sculpting competition every year,” he said. His sculpting prowess did not end there.

Lopez went on to enlist in the U.S. Army, joining the food service division. There, Lopez won a gold medal for a Thanksgiving design he sculpted.

“Ice sculpting was looked very highly upon in the Army and opened a few doors for me,” Lopez said. And it’s doors he hopes to open for his ice-sculpting students. “This is a skill that looks very good on a resumé,” he said.

To launch the program, Lopez counseled with Rick Neilson, Maricopa High’s assistant principal. The two educators found a grant that could be used to purchase the equipment necessary to launch the program the following school year.

“This is a very unique opportunity for the students of Maricopa High School,” Neilson said. “I am not aware of any other high school that offers ice sculpting.” When sculpting ice, Lopez said that it is all about reaching the right consistency of the ice’s outer surface.

“You don’t want the ice to be too cold because it will crack, but then you don’t want it melting away too fast, either.”

To stay in harmonious balance with the ice, Lopez said his class rotates through sculptures, working on one ice group for a couple hours and then rotating them back into the freezer for another ice group.

Initially, second-year students in the school’s two-year culinary arts program are given the option of learning the skill, but Lopez said he is beginning to teach some of the basics to first-year students also.

Currently, the sculptures the students are creating are snowmen, Christmas trees and other holiday themes, but Lopez said anything can be made into an ice sculpture.

Eventually, Lopez and Neilson said they would like to market the students’ ice sculptures to the community to help raise funds to support the culinary club. “Hopefully by next year we can have a freezer of snowmen, reindeer, Christmas trees and other ice sculptures ready for purchase,” Lopez said. Get your cold cash ready.

Two methods of ice sculpting:

Freestyle — This is the most common method of ice sculpting, and most often used in competitions. To freestyle, a sculptor envisions the finished product and takes to the ice with chainsaw, files, picks and other tools, to create the image in his or her mind. Sculptors can have a prepared image of what they want to create to use as reference. Oftentimes, when freestyling for a competition, Lopez said the sculptor will practice the design several times before the event.

Scripted — While freestyle is like drawing on a blank piece of paper, scripted sculpting is like filling in the shapes of a coloring book. To do a scripted sculpture, an ice sculptor projects an image onto a piece of paper the size of his or her block of ice. This image is then traced to the paper and then the paper is applied to the ice to transfer the image. The sculptor then digs in.

Photo by Michael K. Rich