By Mike Finney

HARRINGTON — Jim Victor and his wife Marie Pelton are a Delaware State Fair curiosity seeker’s dream.

They stay confined inside of a cooled-down trailer for much of the day, creating artwork out of more than 400 pounds of butter, while people walking through Exhibit Hall cannot help but stop and be amazed at their creations.

The duo from Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, has been creating this unorthodox food artwork together at state fairs, art shows and other events since 2000.

Just being a part of the excitement that goes with state fairs and bringing attention to their art makes it all worthwhile for Mr. Victor and Ms. Pelton, who both graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and have been working together since the late 1990s.

“I got into (carving butter) a long time ago at the Pennsylvania Farm Show,” Mr. Victor said. “There was actually an ad in the paper, and I answered the ad, and I had done chocolate sculptures before that, so I got the job. That was 1995, so that was a long time ago.”

Ms. Pelton said she never envisioned that her career path would ever lead her to become a butter sculptor.

“It was way out of my imagination when I was a child or even going to art school,” she said. “Actually, I met Jim while I was actually in art school and he was doing the butter sculptures for the Pennsylvania Farm Show and another event up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and so I was familiar from him with butter sculptures.

“I thought that they were pretty fascinating and then the scale of them … they were like life-size figures and things like that.”

The theme of their butter sculpture at the Delaware State Fair mirrors that of the fair itself — “Summer Nights & Carnival Lights.”

“This design is actually the fair’s design in the sense that they sent us the logo they had for this year’s fair, and we thought it was pretty cool and we like it,” Mr. Victor said. “We felt like we could do it for a butter sculpture.

“It’s a progressive thing where you keep adding and adding and adding. It’s just too much work to do one (butter sculpture) every day.”

Their work certainly attracts an interested crowd, whether it be young or old. They are always sure to stop and take a look.

“I think their work is absolutely amazing,” said Carol Lawrence, a fairgoer from Elkton, Maryland. “I can’t believe somebody could have that much patience to create something so impressive out of what looks to be a ton of butter.”

On the second day of this year’s fair on a sweltering Friday, the couple was hard at work creating a farm tractor and the Giant Wheel ride that people can enjoy at the Wade Shows Carnival at the Delaware State Fairgrounds.

Ms. Pelton was working meticulously on the tractor because she is a modeler while Mr. Victor said he is better suited at building materials up and getting a piece ready to carve.

Each piece starts as a drawing. Then, they build an armature to give support to the butter sculpture.

The couple has 485 pounds of butter to use for their array of sculptures at the Delaware State Fair.

Of course, there are always some people who decry the waste of the butter, but those individuals just don’t know all the facts.

“Land O’Lakes sponsors it, and they provide ‘casualty butter,’” Ms. Pelton said. “That’s something that they cannot sell to the public due to different factors and they don’t know what to do with it themselves. They have a lot of it.

“One of the best things we do is recycle it. There are many farms that have an anaerobic digester and so we bring it and they put it in the digester with the manure, and all organic material, and it just breaks down and they turn it into electricity and liquid fertilizer for crops.”

While Ms. Pelton might not have seen her life moving in such a buttery direction while growing up, she said she really enjoys her time at the fair, despite the reality of meeting hard deadlines every day with their creations.

“We’re working for around eight hours a day, every single day of the fair, give or take,” she said. “Sometimes we have to modify our schedule and add an hour or so, because every single day I have a goal and I’m sure Jim does in his mind as well, as far as where do you want to be at the end of the day in order to progress.

“We like talking to people and they always tend of be amazed or have a lot of questions, so it’s great. It’s different but it’s something that I really enjoy.”