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Dave Gross, from Seaham in County Durham, must be used to the noise by now.

He normally makes sculptures out of wood with a chainsaw. Lately, he's added ice sculpture to his repertoire.

Dave Gross sculpts wood and ice.

The difference is that wood comes in a handy lump. You have to join blocks of ice together - squirting water and smoothing with the saw - before you can make something big.

Once you've done that you have to make sure it's stable before you start attacking it with a chainsaw.

Doing it in the sun doesn't help. Not so much because the ice melts but because the ultra violet makes the ice craze. Ruins the transparency.

Normally a wood man, Dave dabbled with snow sculpture first and then tried ice. He went to France to do a big snow carving, and picked up some ice carving techniques from other artists who'd come to the event from all over the world.

Try this in your gin and tonic.

And then someone from Newcastle City Council had an idea for a Christmas event, which is where Dave met Darren Brinskey from Newbiggin-by-the-sea.

Do you want ice with that?

They think the council was probably imagining lovely ice Christmas trees, but they made a series of endangered species which they wanted to melt away to make a point. They can do Christmas trees, if it's preferred.

And elephants. They have an order from Oxford University for a 14m long, 3.9m tall carving of two elephants facing each other, to go behind the bar.

They were in Newcastle city centre for World Environment Day, making a big polar bear.

Darren Brinskey started on cruise ships

Darren was a chef for 25 years and learnt how to ice sculpt table decorations on cruise liners.

He says: "I had an aptitude for it. I was shown how to do it on the QE2 and I ended up being better than anybody else there.

"And about ten years ago I just thought, well I'm going to start pushing this and I started advertising in Yellow Pages and it's taken off."

Now, he says, they make ice sculptures for weddings, parties and corporate events. Coloured logos in ice and sculptures you can drink vodka out of are but frozen water off a duck's back. Only size limits them now, he says.

Don't try this at home

Dave uses a petrol chainsaw, which is frightening enough. Darren favours electric.

Stand well back as ice is shredded

Darren says: "I've been using electric - 240 volts - for twenty years. I've never ever had a shock."

Dave thinks it's something to do with the temperature. He thinks it's safe as long as it's freezing. Health and Safety officials need not all write in at once.

They get their ice from a company in London, delivered to a local cold storage company, because they can't manufacture enough for projects this size.

It's expensive. The ice for the polar bear cost 拢1,175. That's mainly for transportation and storage, before you wonder what kind of terrible water metering deal they might have.

The beginnings of an ice polar bear

And, although time is of the essence if you don't want an artistic puddle on the floor, it takes a while to make something out of ice.

It takes a couple of hours to melt the blocks together and then another few hours to carve it.

They make it bigger than they need so it melts to size. They're constantly cutting into the cold ice, which also helps.

Dave's chainsaw meets the ice

Dave doesn't mind that his carefully crafted art doesn't last: "It's nice, you know, to do something and just know that it's just for the day. You couldn't do that with wood; it would be too disturbing.

"And what it does for me...when I'm working in wood it's a much slower process...you use a chainsaw to speed it up, but it's still a lot slower than ice...and what it does is it kind of hones your skill, you know, it makes you have to think quick and you have to work quick. It's just amazing what you can achieve in a few hours."