USU sculptors create Snoopy Carnival course at Beaver Mountain
Ryoichi Suzuki, assistant professor of sculpture at Utah State University, attended the Snoopy Carnival at Beaver Mountain last year. It wasn’t long before his creative gears began to turn.
“Basically, I saw what they’d been doing for the Snoopy Carnival. They built this fun course for those little kids, beginning skiers. I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe we can do a little better job creating those fun courses in a more sculptural way,'” Suzuki said.
This year’s Snoopy Carnival on Saturday, March 19, was sold out. Children skiied on courses built by USU sculpture students. The final course included tunnels, a bridge and mountain peaks made entirely of snow and ice.
Suzuki decided to incorporate the idea into his sculpture projects class. The students in this class create sculptures for public view. Compared to previous projects, the ski course on Beaver Mountain was a “slightly larger scale,” Suzuki said.
Jessyka Barton, an art major with a sculpture emphasis, decided on her emphasis because of Suzuki’s class. Barton was torn between sculpture and painting. When she first committed to painting, she felt that her artwork was “too flat.”
“When I started participating in this class, and we went up on the mountain and started doing stuff with the snow, it was just so exciting for me,” Barton said. “I also talked to professor Suzuki, and I realized that I had been complaining about all of my other classes and that this is where my true passion lies.”
Scott Price, a sophomore in art education, also enjoys sculpture because it allows him to create something tangible. He looked forward to practicing sculpture in a unique way.
“I thought it was something that would be kind of challenging, something I’ve never done before,” Price said. “It’s not building a snowman. It’s building something on a larger scale, working with things we’re familiar with but working in a way we’re not used to working with them in.”
Students began the project by creating a maquette, a 3-D small-scale mold to guide the real-life sculpture. The end goal was to create something “functional, but aesthetically pleasing,” Price said. Price enjoyed this aspect of production because he liked brainstorming with his classmates.
“It’s kind of fun to work with the other students and try to see the different ideas, putting something together that is bigger than all of us individually,” Price said.
But the planning stage was longer than it should have been, Price said. The sculptors underestimated how much work the project would take. The course required long hours and extra days to be completed on time.
Suzuki estimated that they used “hundreds of tons of snow” to build the course, but he admits the exact amount is hard to quantify. Beaver Mountain provided snow-pushing machines to help sculptors move the snow around. Snow changes because of weather and climate, which made working with it unpredictable.
“Beforehand, we knew that the snow changes from day to day because of the sun, the weather, whatever. And then when we’re there, it’s either that the sun has melted it, or overnight it freezes into ice. Or it snowed and it’s all powder and it won’t pack together and it just falls apart,” Barton said.
Price agrees. Part of the challenge was adapting to whatever nature threw at them.
“We ended up having to use pickaxes to be able to chip away at some of the ice, literally move mountains, so to speak,” Price said.
Due to time constraints, some ideas had to be scrapped. There was originally going to be a dragon’s head, where kids could slide into the mouth on sleds. However, while the dragon’s head didn’t make it into the final course, it somehow lived on.
“The funny thing is, before we ended up getting the last part done, a lot of what it looked like — at least the comments we got from other skiers — is that it looked like scales. It didn’t look like mountain peaks. So we still have a dragon in there,” Price said.
Some sculptors were eager to have the project completed and leave long days of manual labor behind. However, for Price, the end of the project is bittersweet.
“I’m excited to see the finished project. I’m excited to see it done. It’s kind of sad to see it already be done, also,” Price said.
– whitney.howard@aggiemail.usu.edu
@omgwhitshutup