The difficult ice sculpture

I hope you are not tired of ice.... This sculpture is made by the artist Rob Harding, he was born in Birmingham but his family moved to Africa when he was a child. He lives in Spain nowadays; not any ice there I suppose. Most of the sculptures on this ice festival have been made by Swedish artists but there are a couple of Bulgarian artists too, and Rob.

This sculpture is actually one of the sculptures I have learnt to love more and more during these two weeks. At the same time it has been one of the sculptures which has been difficult to understand how beautiful it really is and it's not a sculpture easy to photograph. I think this sculpture needs reflecting sun light during the daytime for showing the beauty; unfortunately there has not been any sun visible during these two weeks.... OK, I know, the sun wouldn't help me to get better shots...

I've seen all the sculptures (nearly all) at least twice every day. It has been very interesting because the light seems to change their appearance and the weather has an impact on the ice quality (surface) as well. The ice is very bright and transparent one day, an other day the ice surface is rather frosted or matt. There are things happenings inside the ice as well, or it just seems to be so! The sculptures are never the same!

It's also very obvious that the ice quality is different in every sculpture; that's not strange at all because the ice is "natural" ice from a big river in the Northern Sweden. Did you know that the method to take the ice from the river is called "to harvest the ice" and this is something you begin to do in March, for next winter season (in Jukkasjärvi, the harvest is done mostly for the ice hotel in the same village - http://www.icehotel.com/).