World Skills Calgary 2009

The other day I was out for a walk at lunch and stopped to listen to the fellow on the left who was talking to a small group of people about sculpture. Today I went back and photographed him.

It turns out he and two other artists, including the one posing on the right, had been commissioned by the city of Calgary to sculpt a work for the World Skills contest. Let me step back for a minute and explain that. The World Skills is a demonstration / contest of skilled trades that started in Madrid, Spain in 1950. Today it is a huge event held in different countries every two years and the skills include everything from florist to carpentry. The participants range in age from 17 to 22.

So, back to these two guys and their sculpure. They had a nice demonstration of how they sculpt, but the statute itself is the clever part. The statue is carving herself out of the stone. The part above the waist is finished with a mallet in one hand and a chisel in the other working on the lower half. The lower half is intentionally left rough and shows the stages of how sculpture is done - it is a statue demonstrating how statues are made.

They told me they make a full time living doing commissions, often for cities, but things had slowed a bit with the downturn. In Canada, a condition of building in many places is that public art be added - slow building, reduced commissions.

I was enthused enough by this that I decided to go out to the Stampede grounds and see the rest of what was going on. Turns out it was kind of like a cross between a huge trade show and career day for students. It was pretty neat, but I've seen plumbers brazing before (even tried it myself) as well as painting automobiles. It was my first time to see sculpture in progress though. It took about 3 weeks they said to complete the work.