‘A family heirloom’: Iowa State Fair butter sculptor's twin daughters hope to continue legacy

Grace Pratt’s concern is ears.

Specifically, the ears of Iowa athletes Jack Trice, Kurt Warner and Caitlin Clark.

For the past three weeks, she’s been focused on the particularities of their faces: How Trice has a wide jaw and round cheeks; how Warner’s is angular, with a furrowed brow; and how Clark’s features are longer and thinner — more feminine than the other two, obviously. And Grace feels really good about how those characteristics turned out.

But the UNI studio art major knows that ears — which are as unique to individuals as fingerprints — can be the feature that makes a sculpture’s resemblance uncanny or the one that leaves viewers wondering…Wait, who is that?

And considering these likenesses are being sculpted out of butter — a medium not especially known for its sharp angles or its ability to hold shapes — Grace wants to bring as much reality to her depictions as possible. Hence her current focus on ears, their ridges, their lobes and where precisely they sit on each person’s head.

“I know it doesn’t have to be exact, but I want it to be as close to the real thing as possible,” she says, her gaze focused on butter Kurt Warner’s eyebrows with the intensity of a jeweler setting a diamond ring. “For me, as a sculptor, I just want it to be right.”

More: RAGBRAI riders never forgot the ‘magic’ of this small-town waitress. 36 years later, they reunited

Grace and her twin sister, Hannah, have been apprenticing on the Iowa State Fair’s butter sculptures unofficially since they were in utero, they say with a laugh. Their mother, Sarah Pratt, has been sculpting at the fair since 1991 and became the head sculptor in 2006, when the twins were just toddlers.

They grew up spending every July and August in the cooler, in the process becoming more sure of themselves as artists and as people. A few years ago, Sarah made the twins apprentices, tasking them with sculpting more and more of the fair’s ambitious dairy artwork.

And this fair, these butter Botticellis are being more public, more official, with their roles — and with their desire to continue their mom’s legacy whenever she’s ready to hang up her butter paddles.

A childhood of summers in the Iowa State Fair butter cow cooler

To be clear: Sarah’s not retiring anytime soon, but is it ever too early to make a transition plan for something as iconic as the fair’s butter cow?

“The thing I love about Hannah and Grace is they have that drive,” Sarah says. “They have this amazing internal force that makes the creative process just part of their souls, which is so invigorating.

“Literally, they were 3 years old when I took over as the full-time sculptor,” she adds, turning to watch the girls across the room. “And from that age on, can you remember a time that you weren't sculpting butter?”

Bundled against the chill of the 40-degree butter cooler — a necessity to keep the butter presentation looking fresh after 11 days of Iowa State Fair heat — the twins shake their heads no, barely looking up from their work on this year’s athlete butter models.

The butter cow was so much a part of their lives, in fact, that they didn’t realize that everyone’s mom wasn’t spending summers sculpting condiments.

“I didn't ever know a difference,” says Hannah, who’s hard at work on the IOWA in Caitlin’s jersey. “Mom was a teacher during the school year and sculpted butter in the summer, and that's just how it was.”

More: Iowa State Fair to feature Caitlin Clark, Kurt Warner, and Jack Trice as butter cow companions

While other families spent summers sunning at the lake, their earliest summers were spent in the corner of the butter cooler, watching cartoons on an iPad under big fluffy blankets — out of reach of the butter, but still under their mom’s watchful eye.

And when the twins became a little more mobile, Sarah and her husband, Andy, would divide and conquer. One girl went in the stroller with dad, running errands to grab whatever Sarah needed — mostly energy in the form of corndogs — and the other was handed a glob of butter on a sheet of wax paper.

“They would make whatever, and they would ham it up and entertain the crowds with it,” Sarah says. “I'm pretty sure it was Grace that made a butter crown.”

“You were 4 years old,” she adds, craning her neck to see Grace. “And she modeled it. They were always covered, absolutely covered in butter from head to toe.

Grace smiles and adds: “Butter was our playdough.”

Daughters learn butter sculpting through tips, research, trial and error

The twins were naturally artistic like their mom. An art teacher during the school year, Sarah was preternaturally creative, but learned the particularities of butter sculpting through her apprenticeship with longtime sculptor and fair legend Norma Lyon.

For 14 years, Sarah was taught the trade and the process slowly, she says, tips doled out over time so it felt like she was always learning, always stretching.

Just like nondairy art, butter art is a practice, not a final product, Sarah says.

The twins have taken that mantra to heart, listening to their mother’s best suggestions, but developing their own style and techniques from research and good old trial and error.

As they grew in their sculpting, their mother graduated them to harder and harder sculpting tasks. They went from creating the “butter pancakes” needed to coat the metal framework inside the cow to being in charge of a single element of the companion sculptures, start to finish.

For Grace, the first element that was totally her own was a rabbit in her mom’s butter tribute to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

“I had to research and create some kind of armature and sculpt it,” she says. “It was the first thing that I made all on my own that was put in the case for everyone to see. That was my thing, and I was super proud of it.”

More: Can you make a butter sculpture at home? We tried it out.

Their work at the fair helped form their interests outside of the cooler, too. They started exploring other types of art: sketching and painting for Grace and costume design for Hannah. And in the past few years, they’ve used those lessons to hone their individual butter expertise.

Grace is the face guru, Sarah says, and she’s pretty particular about making their butter visages look like specific people and not just copy-and-paste faces.

To that point, she says, not only are ears important. But the space between your nose and your lips — the philtrum — is also make or break as far as resemblance. As is the placement and protrusion of cheekbones. You’d think eye shape would be a big deal, she says, and that is different on every person, but it’s actually not that defining of a characteristic.

Given Hannah’s interest in costumes — she’s studying theater production at UNI — she’s been assigned fabrics. That task is extremely important, Sarah says, considering their models' skin and clothing are all the same color and texture.

Looking at a reference photo of Clark as she sculpts, Hannah critiques the folds in her butter athlete’s shorts. She’s examining how the fabric stretches differently when she moves her arm in a certain way.

“I did all these wrinkles because I can tell it's a lightweight fabric and she’s bent over so it would bunch there and it would hang forward," she says.

Having the twins' gifted hands has allowed the trio to take on larger butter projects, like this year’s three life-size statues in addition to the butter cow. Although the twins always question how much they can do, Sarah pushes and stretches them. They can do so much more than they give themselves credit for, she knows.

This past winter, the twins took on their own project for the first time. The Iowa Wolves basketball team was hosting an Iowa State Fair night and wanted to celebrate with a butter sculpture of their mascot. Sarah was busy teaching, but Hannah and Grace were home from school on holiday break.

“Grace and I did all the designing, all of the armature building, all of the sculpting, all of the everything,” Hannah says. “It was really awesome to be able to have that opportunity and see, 'Oh, this is what we can do without any help from mom.'”

Like so many aspects of State Fair, butter sculpting has become about family

The fair — and butter — have been a constant throughout Sarah’s high school and college years, various moves, a wedding and the birth of her twins and younger son. She can’t deny that continuing the legacy wouldn’t be cool.

“I knew it would be passed on to somebody; I mean, it's going to be passed on. I am just the person who gets to work with the cow right now,” she says. “It didn't occur to me that my kids would necessarily want to do it or like it."

She turns to them: "So I just feel really excited that for now, this is what you want to do.”

And having the paddles pass to her children feels, well, just right, she says. Togetherness, and family, is really the story of the fair. Whether you’re raising sheep or bringing in a pie to be judged or camping on the hill, there’s often a tribe behind and beside, she says.

But Sarah’s not forcing anything on them. If she’s an old lady still making the butter cow, that’s just fine with her – as long as the twins promise to find even just an hour to pick up some paddles.

“I don't know where life is gonna take me, but I can't imagine myself not being here,” Grace says. “Having to watch somebody else do it; it's like, no, this is me. This is what I do.”

“This is almost like a family heirloom," she adds.

But, listen, she says, there’s a lot of time to decide what the rest of their lives look like. There's decidedly less time to finish these sculptures.

And right now she’s got some ears to sculpt.

Butter cow facts

• There have been five official butter sculptors at the Iowa State Fair. They are, in chronological order, J.K. Daniels, J.E. Wallace, Earl Frank Dutt, Norma “Duffy” Lyon and Sarah Pratt.

• Duffy Lyon, the fair’s first female sculptor, started in 1960 and held the title for more than 40 years before she retired in 2006.

• Much of the butter used in the sculptures is recycled and can be reused for up to 10 years.

• A real dairy cow weighs more than 1,000 pounds, but the butter version comes in at around 600 pounds.

• The butter used in the butter cow could spread over 19,200 slices of toast and would take an average person two lifetimes to consume.

• The famous butter cow has been paired with companion butter sculptures since 1996. The subjects of the companion sculptures have varied widely, including pieces celebrating the Historic Lincoln Highway, “The Field of Dreams,” or, my personal favorite, a butter rendition of Leonardo DaVinci’s “The Last Supper.”

The world's first butter sculptress

The butter cow has become a de facto mascot for the Iowa State Fair ― and the state in general. Every summer, Iowans scramble to get a glimpse at the famous butter bovine and its accompanying butter sculptures.

But who was the first person to look at a stick of butter and think: I see the Venus de Milo?

Turns out she was a mid-1800s Midwestern farm wife whose natural abilities, unrelenting ambition and unconventional artwork catapulted her into headlines and made her a celebrity the world over.

Iowa Columnist Courtney Crowder paired up with “Proof,” a podcast from America’s Test Kitchen, to tell the story of that fantastic farm wife, Caroline Shawk Brooks. Using Caroline’s personal writings and expert analysis from Iowa historians, Crowder traces her rise to fame, her fall from the art world’s graces and the breathtaking way butter helped her carve a new life  — one most women of her time wouldn’t even dare to dream.

The episode will be available in the next few weeks wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about Caroline and other Proof podcasts, visit AmericasTestKitchen.com/Podcasts/Proof.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa State Fair butter sculptor's twin daughters build on her legacy