San Jose resident Paulina Goff Stovall began her career as a professional pumpkin carver at age 18, just out of high school, when she carved a 600-pound pumpkin in the shape of a funnel web spider for a gathering at the home of a local corporate CEO.
“I was so intrigued by the opportunity to carve live for entertainment,” says Stovall. “I love entertaining and have always been artistic.”
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She gets to show off her pumpkin-carving prowess on season 15 of Food Network’s “Halloween Wars,” which premieres on Sept. 21.
Stovall says she could draw “from the time I can remember. I could pick up any art media that you could give a kid.”
Halloween was a favorite time, when she and her three siblings—two of whom are now tattoo artists and the other a muralist—would all carve Jack o’ Lanterns. “My mother always loved carving skulls,” Stovall says.
She began carving with an X-Acto knife, a tool she pays homage to in her logo for her events company, Carved FX. For the last 15 years, though, she has mainly used ceramic sculpting tools, as well as clay and woodworking tools. She sources most of them at Clay Planet in Santa Clara, saying, “You could order these online, but I would rather support local businesses. I love the owners.”
A big supporter of Spina Farms in south San Jose, from which she sources all her giant pumpkins, she estimates she uses about 20,000 pounds of pumpkin each year. “They find exactly what I need,” she says of Spina Farms.
For a Filoli garden party last year, she created a series of garden bugs over seven nights, carving the sculptures at nightfall. “I did a 5-foot garden snail out of two really big pumpkins that weighed 500 pounds,” she says. “I also sculpted a 3-D butterfly, hummingbird and an alien head. My inspiration often comes from mythical creatures.”
Stovall specializes in carving live at workshops as well as at public festivals and high-end parties and corporations, where she engages attendees in an unusual form of team-building. How many times have you tried to turn a pumpkin into something other than pie? While she prefers to perform live, she does execute pre-sculpted displays if that isn’t possible, given her busy schedule.
While she generally performs solo, “Halloween Wars” requires teams. Stovall is a member of team Poisonous Perfection along with Jamie Louks, a sugar artist from Seattle, and cake artist Karine Turgeon of Quebec. The series marks Stovall’s first competition.
Stovall says the teams are all given prompts with a theme they have to execute, basically telling a story in a consumable format, requiring all the ingredients used to be edible. She prefers scary themes.
While the Food Network does a lot of baking competitions, they decided to throw pumpkins into the mix for “Halloween Wars.” This presents its challenges, as pumpkin is wet and sugar breaks down when wet. It was quite a learning curve, Stovall says.
“You have to understand the different chemistry of the ingredients and how they touch in certain ways.”
To learn more about Carved FX, visit https://www.crvdfx.com