G Profile: Edwin Hutchison

Edwin Hutchison keeps his Travelers Rest office a cool fifteen-degrees Fahrenheit year round, and his work uniform is never absent layers of thermal underwear—whether it’s January or June.

A culinary artist in the purest sense, Hutchison’s canvas is a 300-pound block of ice, and his masterpieces can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to create. As the Upstate arm of Ice Age Sculptures, a Charleston-based ice-sculpting business, Hutchison’s work shows up at special events from Simpsonville to Aiken and everywhere in between.

After fourteen years at the carving block, he can make almost anything out of frozen H2O. He helped craft a 16-foot-long, 13-foot-tall wooly mammoth (tusks and all), which was displayed in front of a North Charleston movie theater for the grand opening of Ice Age. He once recreated a version of Mount Rushmore that had the faces of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X carved into it. And then there was the 12-foot-long dragon he sculpted for a wedding reception.

Hutchison got his start in culinary school more than a decade ago. “Something stuck,” he explains (and no, it wasn’t his tongue). “I said, ‘I really think I want to do this.’” He trained for four years under Brian Connors of Ice Age Sculptures in Charleston before bringing an extension of the operation to the Upstate.

“None of this comes easy,” Hutchison explains from his workshop, located in downtown Travelers Rest. Case in point—much of his work is accomplished with an electric chainsaw.

“There’s a lot of physics in it. And there’s no time to second-guess yourself,” he explains. “Sometimes, there’s no turning back.”