Henry Parkes came briefly to life in ice at the National Portrait Gallery on Sunday before the likeness began its slow melt, in the process morphing into something that artist Glenn Smith joked was closer to Ned Kelly than the father of federation.
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Smith turned his power tools to three giant ice carvings outside the gallery to mark 200 years since former NSW premier Henry Parkes was born. He made a carving of Parkes's distinctive grizzled profile with beard, a 1.7-metre sculpture of his entire body, and a two-metre sculpture of his gothic Sydney home.
Given the challenging weather, he did the face first because, as Smith says, faces melt better than houses.
"I knew the bust would last longest and travel the best over the day," he says. "Large-scale faces tend to melt fairly gracefully, whereas buildings don't, they lose their details."
Even so, there are some tricks to making a face last longer – such as a nose 10 to 20 per cent bigger, giving it room to drip.
Smith says his works look their best about an hour after he has finished them. But late in the day, as the sculptures were facing their final demise, Henry Parkes was changing.
"Most people recognise him as Henry Parkes. At this stage he probably looks like Ned Kelly though," the artist observed.
Smith's art is peculiarly ephemeral but as a former chef, he takes that aspect of his work in his stride.
"To have it melt is not an issue," he insists. "I'm from a hospitality background so I'm used to producing something and have someone eat it."
