Ice sculptures: the pics

They're gorgeous in blazing sunshine, one day after they've been finished.

It's the "Arts meed Ice" ice sculpture competition, and the blogpost about it is here.

I just betcha that these sculptures are stunning in the dark of late afternoon (the park closes at 1800 ...), back lit with clear and/or colored lights.

A view of one part of the contest area:
Pic: Part of the contest area, with a few sculptures. (The moose, the mice, the monk seal and the egret, in case you're wondering).

Here are the sculptures:

First prize
Team # 10: "Survivors". Batmunkh Tserendash, Tuvshintur Rashaanjav, Mongolia.
Pic: Two lizards, front view.
Pic: Two lizards, back view.
Pic: Detail: a fly on a tongue.
This team worked with hand tools (as opposed to chain saws and similar). And they had come to Helsinki with the Trans-Siberian Railway, which took them 6 days. One of the two lizards has a fly on his tongue, but I couldn't get close enough for a sharp pic of that - so you only get a blurred detail pic, sorry.

Second prize
Team # 11: "Eläköön Lenan ja Sammen liitto" (= "Long live the union of the sturgeon and Lena"). Fyodor Markov, Mikhail Sleptsov, Russia.
Pic: A sturgeon, side view.
Pic: A sturgeon, front view.
Pic: Detail: the fish.
Lena is a river in Russia, and the sturgeon is an endangered fish - the fish which produces the official caviar. This sculpture won the public vote of the day. It gets my vote, as well.

Third prize
Team # 13: "Rupilisko". Juha Ahonen, Kimmo Frosti, Finland.
Pic: A lizard: front view.
Pic: A lizard: side view.
It's a gorgeous endangered local lizard.

Fourth place
Team # 12: "Mates". Antti Kares, Antti Pedrozo, Finland.
Pic: A pair of lizards.

Fifth place
Team # 7: "Egretta alba". Jan Fedorcak, Jakub Doubal, Czech Republic.
Pic: An egret.
It's a very elegant egret.

Sixth place
Team # 6: "Monachus monachus". Varol Topac, Sema Okan, Turkey.
Pic: A diving seal.
It's a monk seal diving down into the ice, and it's very nice, once you start to look at the details. This team hadn't worked with ice before - they used their normal woodworking tools.

The rest were unplaced:
Team # 1: "Simple life". Kenji Ogawa, Australia, and Hanna Pärssinen, Finland.
Pic: A penguin.
A penguin in a shell.

Team # 2: "Grey zone". Darren Jackson, Ben Edson, Great Britain.
Pic: A squirrel.
Pic: Detail: the hidden acorn.
It's a squirrel, and I expect that the hidden-away acorn hints to the movie "Ice Age".

Team # 3: "The Missing Part". Lora Dimova, Vera Gezenko, Bulgaria.
Pic: Missing.
It looks very much as if they didn't manage to finish their piece. Or perhaps a crucial part of the sculpture broke before it was done? Or I'm blind, and can't see what this should be.

Team # 4: "Karelian Spring". Natalia Chistyakova, Evgeny Zavyalov, Russia.
Pic: A moose.
Pic: Detail: the head.
It's a moose on its back, with its back feet in the air. According to a local paper the team hints that meese are endangered - they're not. There's hundreds of thousands of them in Finland, and hunters aren't able to hunt enough of them to thin the herd.

Team # 5: "Where do the holes come from". Tiiu Kirsipuu, Karmo Kiivit, Estonia.
Pic: Mice on cheese, one view.
Pic: Mice on cheese, another view.
Pic: Detail: mouse.
A fun piece with two mice running along a slice of cheese. This particular cliché doesn't work, though: mice are much fonder of, say, smoked fish, than they are of cheese. I know cos they don't hit the traps with cheese for bait all that much.

Team # 8: "Start or end." Zigmunds Vilnis, Valdemars Vilnis, Latvia.
Pic: A dinosaur in its egg.
Pic: Detail view.
A lovely dinosaur inside its egg.

Team # 9: "Brain coral". Brigitte Goirand, Mexico, and Conny den Brave, the Netherlands.
Pic: A brain coral in a triangle.
Pic: Detail: the coral.
A reef full of them would have been showier than the one brain coral in that strange triangle. But I expect that a reef full of them might have been too difficult to make within the four hour limit - and this way I got to look at pretty coral pictures. Woot!

Team # 14: "Vanhat pojat viiksekkäät" (= "Old mustached boys"). Marika Niittykoski, Antti Niittykoski, Finland.
Pic: The old man and the seal.
Pic: The old man and the seal.
The theme of the contest was endangered animals. This team chose to show an endangered ringed seal with an endangered Finnish farmer. Finns will snigger at the markings on the man's shirt ... the sculpture didn't sport the belt knife that should go with that shirt, though.