If there’s a perfectly Canadian material an artist can use to capture that wild moment when a Canada goose fought off a vicious attack from a bald eagle, it might be ice.
“As strong as ice is, as heavy as it is and as dangerous as it can be, it’s also really fragile,” Toronto artist Sarah Blostein said. “If it doesn’t have the right conditions … it just melts, or shatters or disappears.”
Blostein said the photos by Oakville, Ont., photographer Mervyn Sequeira sent the message of “strength and resilience” that she needed in the middle of “so much depressing news” to create a unique piece — an ice sculpture inspired by Sequeira’s images.
When he spoke to CBC Hamilton, Sequeira said while he doesn’t like getting into politics, he found the encounter between the two birds “very symbolic.”
Since becoming president again last November, Trump has commented repeatedly on wanting Canada to become the 51st state, and has imposed hefty tariffs on steel, aluminum and other goods entering the U.S. from Canada. Canada has responded with tariffs of its own.
Blostein said that from the moment she came up with the idea for the ice art, she wanted it to be a two-person project, with an American sculpting the U.S.’s national bird. So Blostein enlisted her colleague, Riley Knaus, to complete the piece with her.
‘Crazy geese pulling ninja moves’
First reported by CBC Hamilton, the story including the photos of the Canada goose-bald eagle fight was covered by news outlets around the world.
Sequeira originally posted the pictures to his Instagram account on Feb. 25, telling CBC Hamilton a few days later that, from his perspective, “that is how nature works.”
“But we’re living in a slightly polarized world just now, so some people looked at it differently,” he said.
He said the eagle made “several attempts” to attack the goose at the LaSalle Marina.
“When we thought that it was really over for the goose, strangely, the bald eagle just gave up and left.”
Blostein said she found the pictures “funny” and they “looked like a political satire cartoon.”
“I have never seen a Canada goose go like full ‘ninja,’ and that’s what was so great about it,” she said.
Blostein was the only Canadian in her group when she saw the photos and said her American colleagues often teased her about the idea of Canada becoming the 51st state.Â
Blostein said the pictures evoked a “sentiment of ’51st state, my ass,'” inspiring her to leave her mark and show “Americans don’t know what they’re in for if they try to [annex Canada].”
“We’re proud of everything that makes us Canadian and we might be crazy geese pulling ninja moves,” she said.
A cross-border collaboration
Blostein said she is “obsessed with Halloween,” which brought her to pumpkin carving and, eventually, ice sculpting.
She arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska, in January to volunteer at the World Ice Art Championships with only one three-day sculpting class under her belt. She participated in one contest, but it wasn’t until she was helping out with the children’s competition that she saw extra pieces of ice and thought to sculpt the goose.
Knaus heard Blostein talking about the pictures for “a few hours” before he looked closely at the interaction between the two birds. The pictures “spoke” to him and so he agreed to the collaboration.
“We weren’t carving [the same piece] together, but we were able to create a finished piece together,” he told CBC Hamilton.
Knaus, 22, is a chainsaw artist based in Coos Bay, Ore. This was his third year at the ice championship in Alaska.
He said the tense U.S.-Canada relations were not on his mind until after he finished carving the bald eagle.
“You do start to see the bigger picture rather than being so dialled in …Â it almost becomes metaphorical at that point,” he said.
“Because I was focused on my side, I wasn’t really too concerned what was going [on with Blostein].”
Knaus and Blostein ended up picking different pictures from Sequeira’s photo shoot to reference. Blostein went for the “dynamic” goose pose in the most recognizable picture, while Knaus went for a more reserved pose for the eagle.
Knaus said he liked the expression of the eagle feeling “taken aback” in one of the photos and thought it would be better to give the goose more of a spotlight.
“I felt towards the emotion of the goose more so than I did the eagle at that point,” he said.
Knaus said Canadians are “beautiful people” who should be “fighting for what you guys believe in.”
He said carving the sculpture was also a good opportunity for the youth to see other artists in action, “rather than just take some pointers.”
Blostein and Knaus wanted to name the piece Honk, Mother-Flocker, Do You Speak it? as a nod to the Samuel L. Jackson line from 1994’s Pulp Fiction, but chose the more family-friendly Fowl Play, seeing as they were helping out in a children’s competition.
“Seeing that picture, which was both nature and art, through the eyes of the photographer, and being able to amplify that with another form of art — there’s just something really special about that for me,” Blostein said.
