WATERVILLE, Maine — A Maine snow sculpting team will represent the state as the only all-women squad in the U.S. National Snow Sculpting Championship in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, next week.
Competitors will have several days to construct an elaborate sculpture from a block of snow using only hand tools.
“[Its] kind of like the Olympics of art, where you’re actually like really challenged physically [and] mentally,” Serena Sanborn, the captain of the Chickadees, said Sunday.
The team is made up of Sanborn, her sister Phoebe, and their friend Desiree Dubois. On Sunday, they were busy practicing at Waterville’s Quarry Road Trails, chiseling away a smaller version of the sculpture they plan to make in Wisconsin: a depiction of the Greek goddess Artemis.
The choice of the divine figure is in honor of NASA’s Artemis II mission, which plans to land the first woman on the moon this year.
To the Chickadees, landing in the world of snow sculpting is not as difficult, but they're breaking barriers just the same.
“Women have never not been invited [to the competition], but sometimes you have to be explicit in your welcoming,” Phoebe Sanborn said Sunday.
“It’s brave to be a female artist," Dubois added. "And I think its brave to be a female artist sculpting in subzero temperatures.”
The toil of making art in often bitterly cold temperatures, under a time frame that can sometimes demand working overnight, is, to the seasoned snow sculptor, a source of invigoration.
“This is the stuff that life is made of .... like stuff like this, this is what you got to do,” Dubois said.
And while the fruits of this hard artistic labor eventually do melt into the ground, the Chickadees find meaning not only in their more permanent place in the world of snow sculpting, but in the beauty of the art form itself.
As Serena Sanborn puts it, “Its ephemeral, like it’s there for a moment then gone. And I love that it’s also larger than life.”