Clearly, there is such thing as a “natural” when it comes to ice carving.

May we present, as our prime piece of evidence, Nandasari Polwatta Gedarage, the winner of the “People’s Choice” award at this year’s Bloor-Yorkville Icefest ice-carving contest on Saturday afternoon.

“I came here in 2012. I came here from Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, I’d never even seen ice,” he humblebragged, cradling his trophy and a cheque for a cool $850 as the sun set on Day 1 of the weekend-long Icefest festivities in Yorkville Park. “In 2013, my first time participating, I won third place . . . My skill turned to ice.”

He’s not kidding. Five years along from when he first traded carving wood and making cement statues after moving to Scarborough to focus on the much less permanent medium of frozen H20, Gedarage has won 12 ice-carving competitions.

He already took first place at another contest in Peterborough earlier this winter and, in fact, Saturday marked his third time coming out on top at Icefest, this year for a rather spectacular, spiky-helmeted crystalline knight on horseback befitting the event’s 2018 theme of “Medieval Times.”

And this despite temperatures in the low pluses, the bane of every ice carver’s existence. Apparently, around -10 is the sweet spot; once you get down to -20 things can get as brittle as a champagne glass.

“I couldn’t get too many details,” lamented Gedarage. “The weather is a bit hot.”

The weather was only predicted to get warmer on Sunday, reaching perhaps as high as 12 degrees, which lent a tragic kind of urgency to the intricate work that Gedarage and his fellow carvers managed to chainsaw and chisel from 12 300-pound blocks of ice in just a brisk three hours apiece Saturday afternoon.

If you’re hoping to see their work, get there early on Sunday because it could all be gone — or at least rendered unrecognizable — in about the same amount of time.

These sculptures are not built to last. As third-place winner Frederick Marquila — who hacked a fearsome-looking dragon towering over castle ramparts out of his ice block on Saturday but also sculpts from time to time in the similarly impermanent, albeit decidedly more edible, media of butter, chocolate, fruits and vegetables — put it, ice sculpture is “disposable art.”

Just part of the game, though, said second-place carver Dave Tettman, who contributed a fiercely angular knight of his own to the temporary sculpture gallery on Cumberland St.

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“If you were to do something like I did today in wood, it would take you months. But here, it’s three hours,” said Tettman, a graphic artist and sign maker by trade. “Ice? Yeah, it melts. But you take a picture and you have memories and you come out here and you see the people and they all come out to a beautiful event like this and support it, so whether it’s there for a day or a week depending on the weather — the longer the better, of course — it’s still nice to be able to pull off a piece and walk away from it.”

Icefest isn’t just about ice, ice, ice for the sake of ice, of course. The 13-year-old event — which grew out of Yorkville restaurant Sassafraz’s original, 18-year-old ice-carving contest — is also a fundraiser for the Heart & Stroke Foundation, February being Heart & Stroke Month. Donations for 2018 should tally “close to the $90,000 mark” by the end of the weekend, predicted Briar de Lange, executive director of the Bloor-Yorkville BIA.

That’s one of the reasons Tettman’s been coming back to compete for 12 years.

“I come down to support the Heart & Stroke Foundation,” he said. “My mother passed away and she had a stroke and I helped take care of her for about 15 years, so I know how hard it is for support people, for family and that. So when you put on an event for Heart & Stroke, I’m there.”