Ice sculpting exhibitions are nothing new to the people of Ukraine during wintertime, but this year the country’s artists have come up with something quite unique – combining flowers with ice to the most dramatic effect.
The Kyiv Post reports that the “Flowers of the Ice Queen” exhibition, being held at Spivoche Pole in Kiev, features ten compositions of natural flowers covered in a layer of ice, creating the effect of beautiful and intricately detailed ice sculptures. Organizers said that each sculpture was designed to represent one of ten districts in the city where it was made.
Flower arrangers used a dazzling array of roses, orchids, dianthus and cyclamens to create their floral ice sculptures, which have the unusual effect of bringing together the opposites of warmth and cold, and summer and winter.
In order to make the ice sculptures, artists used more than 250 litres of distilled water, pouring numerous ‘layers’ onto the flowers over the course of one week in order to make the ice cubes perfectly transparent – a process that one of the sculptors remarked, “was a very painstaking job”. But by freezing the flowers in blocks of ice, the artists have managed to sustain the color, vitality, shape and natural beauty of the flowers in a way that simply trying to preserve them in water could never achieve.
Organizers say that the Flowers of the Ice Queen exhibition will continue throughout the rest of this month. In the meantime, here’s a short video of the expo for you to enjoy, courtesy of JewishNewsOne :)
Main image courtesy bcmphoto via flickr.com