Kimmirut artists compete in Ottawa snow sculpture competition

MIRIAM HILL

Donny Pitsiulak and his teammates will be sculpting in a different medium than they are used to this week. Instead of soapstone, marble, or serpentine, Team Nunavut has been sharpening its chisels and knives in anticipation of the Canada Snow Sculpture Competition being held during Ottawa’s Winterlude celebrations.

Full-time artists Ooloopie Killiktee and Eyesiak Pudloo, also from Kimmirut, will join Pitsiulak in creating a sculpture out of a giant block of snow. The blocks sitting in front of City Hall measure 3.7 metres (12 feet) wide, 3.7 metres deep and 4.3 metres (16 feet) high.

The event, part of Ottawa’s annual winter festival, brings 13 teams from across the country to create works based on the theme “Our Mythological World.” About 400,000 visitors are expected see the snow sculptures.

Team captain Pitsiulak, speaking hours before hopping on a plane to start his journey South, said a jury in Ottawa who liked their proposal picked the Kimmirut team from others in Nunavut.

The sculpture will be based on the Inuit legend of Luumajuq — the myth of a woman transformed into a white whale.

“I chose this story because it will look good down there and it’s a long-time story and it really happened, too,” he said. “We’re going to make a woman with an amauti dragged by a whale and the whole story will be written on the side, too.”

The teams worked for 38 hours between Feb. 5 and 8 to finish their works before the official awards ceremony Feb. 10.

“We have to see the ice first. It’s like soapstone, we have to see the soapstone first,” Pitsiulak said of his team’s game plan. “We just talk about it and we just have to work together. We talk about the picture first and then put it into the snow.”

This is Pitsiulak’s second year at Winterlude and he said he choose the other two team members because he’s worked with them in Kimmirut before.

“And I know they wake up early in the morning, too, that’s the most important thing,” he said laughing.

Last year Mother Nature wreaked havoc with the sculpture competition. “It got windy and rainy and they all melted down,” he said. “When we only had three more hours, it melted.”

This year there were fears the weather would again be too mild for a proper winter celebration, but a late cold snap saw the city’s Rideau canal finally open to skaters last weekend and promises of continuing low temperatures have sculptors and event organizers keeping their fingers crossed.

Pitsiulak did learn one thing from last year’s event, though: putting salt on the roads is hard on sculptors’ clothes.

“Too much salt on the road so all our clothes got white,” he said chuckling.

He also said there is a marked difference between snow in Ottawa and Kimmirut. Snow is collected from roads in the nation’s capital and put into a big container, where it’s compacted. Then the walls are opened and out comes a block of snow. Some of it is good to work with, he said, and other parts can be harder, mixed with sand.

But he’s versed his teammates on what they will be facing and he’s optimistic about the team’s chances of winning an award — that is, unless he gets lost wandering the streets of the big city after the day’s carving is done.

“When I’m down there, I don’t use the streets, I use the shapes of the buildings,” he said. “That’s how I get around.”