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The art of ice sculpture PLUS a look at Concord’s winter fest

By Zachary Lewis

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It is the time of year for ice sculpting and this is not a reference to clearing off the windshield in the morning. Ice sculpting is an art and the people involved in this pursuit are artists.

Jeff Day operates Ice Designs in Plymouth. This business handles all things ice. From sculpture to making the blocks themselves, to delivering ice bars across state lines, Day is in his element in the cold and is in the middle of an ice delivery.

“Right now we’re bringing ice to another set of carvers in Maine. We supply ice to Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont to ice sculptors as well as ourselves. I guess I’d say we’re the busiest of the ice sculptors in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. We also supply. So if it’s not our ice we’re carving, someone else is carving our ice, which is cool,” Day said.

These cold waters run deep.

“I’ve been doing it since, I don’t know, I’m going to say like 1993, maybe. So quite a while ago. We’re located in Plymouth, New Hampshire. We got a warehouse and big freezers. Our busy season is basically December through March and then we have a lot of outside jobs,” Day said.

Day and his company have worked for corporations like Red Bull for snowboard competitions and exhibitions. “So for Red Bull, we’ve done ice jobs on top of ski mountains for their professional riders. It’s cool. We’ve been blessed. We’ve done a lot.”

In the beginning, the culinary world propelled Jeff into the ice sculpting world.

“I was a chef by trade and I moved right to San Diego. Every Sunday there was at least five sculptures at our brunch. I was like, I don’t know, 20 years old. We did carve one in school and once I became a little more proficient as a chef and started being the boss I started doing a little carving on the side. Finally a chef asked me if I could carve something. He asked me if I could carve an eagle. I said, ‘How many blocks do you have?’ He says three. So, if I have a third block of ice, I made something that I felt represented the eagle well enough. It wasn’t great, but like I always say, I made a lot of ugly ones for a while until I got it figured out.”

Like a chef using an assortment of cutlery and utensils to craft the perfect dish, an ice sculptor relies on different tools.

“A chainsaw is very much a go-to for us,” Day said. “We do chisels. I use chisels a lot. We do have power tools. Basically, they look like drill bits.They’re from the milling industry, metalworking. We modify stuff in order to get what we need … there’s a few things out there that are made specific for us, but most of it’s taken from other industries. We use grinders with sandpaper, aluminum oxide sandpaper. And then we have some power tools, some brass and things like that that we put in die grinders.”

A die grinder works at high speed. “Like a big Dremel,” Day said. “It looks like a drill, but it’s really not. It spins at like 25,000 RPMs, and we can plunge with it, and we can carve with it.”

Ice Designs does not need to wait for a polar vortex to get blocks of ice.

“We produce our own ice, so we have 16 block makers.The block makers, they’re called Clinebell block makers, and they make crystal clear ice. It takes us three days to make two blocks of ice. We have 16 machines that make 64 blocks a week. Each block is about 45 gallons of water and we freeze it from the bottom up.”

There is a method to this freezing madness, Day said. “As it freezes, we have a circulator pump, and that pump moves the water around and gets rid of any oxygen that’s in the water. And that’s what makes it clear and any impurities or anything go to the top of the water.”

The water sinks below and all the impurities rise to the top. “So when we cut the top of this off at the end of the three days, we end up with a rectangle, a big block of ice that weighs 300 pounds and is crystal clear.” The block is 40 inches tall, 20 inches wide, and 10 inches thick, he said.

Everything beautiful comes from the effervescent ice. “We can take those, like right now we have 70 blocks with us and we’re going up here and they’re going to build a big ice bar event, so we can stack these blocks and make a 10-foot-tall horse if we want,” Day said.

It is hard for Jeff to pick one favorite design over the years especially since Ice sculpture is such a passion for him. “We’ve done so many, it’s been such a good run. We’ve done some really cool dragons. I just did a competition last year, I did a dragon. I was pretty psyched about it. People ask if I have a favorite one. I don’t know. There’s been so many. I just really enjoy it,” Day said.

For an installation Day typically pre-makes the pieces to be assembled on site but the sculpture is carved in real time.

“I call it the big project,” he said. “And the next morning, the day of the event, I go and I get to carve that into … a horse or a dragon or an astronaut or whatever the case may be. That’s the best because it’s the last day, all the other stuff is done and I try to uncover this and make this thing look killer, which is fun. The last day is enjoyable.”

Day has the ability to carve and sculpt despite the season and has a few helpers to assemble the frozen magic.

“The weather is always a gamble, so we try to do as much ahead as possible,” he said. “I have a huge freezer, a 26-by-36 freezer I can drive a forklift in at my warehouse, and we have two other freezers. … I have a guy that helps me, Jamie, a high school friend for years, he’s a retired police officer. My girlfriend, Holly, she helps me a ton. I have another friend, Alex, that helps out a little, and between them, we can get this all done. We’re pretty darn efficient because we have to be.”

Those with a passion to sculpt ice into whatever their heart desires just need to ask around to find their path into this world. “Find someone like myself and work for them. I carved ice on the side, like my side hustle for a long time, and I was competing and doing well with that,” he said. “I went to Boston and got in with a guy named Steve Rose. Steve Rose and Bill Covitz. Those guys were absolute rock stars and they really humbled me. I worked with those guys a lot and that really was the next step to help me get better at my game. Unfortunately, most of us sculptors are, I would say, 40 and older.”

Eric Knoll is on the younger side of ice sculptors in the world.

“Eric is the youngest guy and he’s got another job so he’s part-time as a side hustle and he’s doing a pretty good job,” Day said about Knoll.

Knoll was turned on to the art of ice sculpture at culinary school.

“I went to Johnson & Wales in Providence, Rhode Island, for culinary and started learning it in college, essentially. I’ve been doing it inside since I learned it. It’s been 15 years and I can’t stop doing it,” Knoll said.

“It actually is no longer taught in culinary school, but when I first learned it, it was for cruise ships and buffets and centerpieces, weddings and stuff like that,” he said.

Ice sculpture was where Knoll found another outlet, besides cooking, for his artistic gift. “I actually didn’t know what ice carving was. The first year I was at college they had a family event on the weekend and I walked by it and I was like, ‘What is this?’ Then I just tried to learn everything I could possibly learn about it. But before that, I mean, I can’t draw. I can’t paint. Am I creative? Absolutely.”

He recalls that one of his first competitions was in Keene, New Hampshire, “which they still have going and I still participate every year since and it’s just part of ice carving in the winter.”

Each competition inspires Knoll to make something different.

“I try to do new ones I haven’t done before at a competition because it’s a place to do it where you can kind of test the limits. You’re usually outside if things work out, the weather is cold enough. So you can do different things that you couldn’t do if the weather wasn’t cold.”

The ocean has been an inspiration. “The very first one I learned was a lighthouse, because obviously we’re in Rhode Island, so sticking with the theme,” he recalled. “But I’ve carved many different themes, different types of sculptures.”

These sculptures have led Eric around the globe. “I’ve gone to the World Championships up in Fairbanks, Alaska, for three years in a row, and that’s a whole different competition on its own. Usually like to stick with the nautical or sea creature theme, just a lot of detail you can do in those sculptures. One year I did a bunch of fish. I think the year before was a bunch of fish in a coral reef. I’ve done an eagle.”

One sea creature is still on his list to sculpt. “There’s an octopus that I haven’t done yet. I actually tried to do it in Keene two years ago and the weather was too warm … and I was put right on Main Street with no sunshade, so it was just not feasible to pull that sculpture off. So one day, eventually, I will pull off an octopus. In Alaska I’ve done a full underwater scene. There was a shark. There were jellyfish in the sea, two or three other sea creatures on that one as well, but I’ve done a lot of other things. I carved a giant scorpion one year. I’ve done some realistic sculptures as well,” Knoll said.

At the Winter Festival in Concord he tied for first place in 2023 with Michael Legassey and he earned first place in 2019. Knoll is still deciding on what to sculpt for the Festival this year.

“I do not know yet. It really is weather-dependent. I usually wait until like the week before and look at the forecast of the weather to decide what type of design I can do and what type of sculpture. That’s usually how I prepare for a lot of the competitions. You do plan ahead, but you have a backup just in case the weather changes and you can’t actually carve what you’re trying to carve based on how warm or cold it is,” Knoll said.

Ice, unsurprisingly, is quite temperature-dependent. “There’s a lot of techniques involved, so you can actually fuse blocks of ice together or pieces together, but that can only really be achieved at 30 degrees or less or you’ve got to use dry ice and then it’s really messy and it’s not as easy to do as many of those fuses. Cold weather is what we look for in outside competitions.”

Knoll helps put on the Winter Festival with Intown Concord and The Hotel Concord and has been “part of it from the very beginning when it first started. I helped with a big part of planning it and growing it each year.”

Growth is important; the world of ice sculpting may be smaller than you think.

“Yeah, the community of ice carving is very small,” Knoll said. “That’s where I say, yeah, we compete against each other and obviously we’re competitive but we all are there to help each other and learn from each other. We’ll help stack each other’s blocks of ice…. It’s really a whole community and it’s a big team even though it’s a competition.

Featured Image: Courtesy photo.