Artist gets her kicks from playing with sticks, of butter
4:37 p.m. Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Hutchinson — She's dressed like an Eskimo and gloved like a surgeon.
"I usually work very strange hours like noon 'til 2 in the morning, which you don't have too much company at that point," Sharon Bumann said.
It's a lonely job, but one Bumann can't get enough of.
"It's always a lot of fun."
As an artist, Bumann started painting portraits and doing bronze statues, but when the butter sculpture job at the New York State Fair opened up more than a decade ago, she decided to give dairy designs a shot.
"If you take too much off or you need to add some, you just hold it in your hand and it softens enough you can just apply it," she said.
Now she's a regular at the Kansas State Fair and many others across the country.
Her work is finished before the fair opens, nearly a week in temperatures dipping below 40 degrees, scraping and smoothing her vision.
"Everyone of my butter sculptures is sort of a narrative, and it tells a little bit of a story," she said.
And with the fair's theme, "A Wild Ride," she hope this year's sports car mishap creation will live up to the expectations fair-goers have set for her.
While Bumann says it will probably be January before she can even think about eating butter again, her summers will remain dedicated to getting her kicks from the hundreds of sticks it takes to make something like this.
"My mother used to say don't play with your food, and now I'm making a living playing in food," Bumann said.
Bumann says most states supply butter in large blocks, but Kansas is unique.
She says the Kansas State Fair can only get butter in sticks.
So, each years' volunteers have to help unwrap thousands of sticks of butter to use for the sculpture.
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