Nina Sowmoan - sand sculpture

There are some sculptures I will share with you that are not my proudest moments. This is one such one. However, I want to document them all and behind every sculpture is a story and a lesson learned. With Nina Sowmaon (get it?) I learnt about Sculptural Darwinism.

Fergus Mulvany and myself were invited to De Spelerij In the Netherlands to make animal sculptures in this great family fun park. I wrote about it before in my other posts, (Links below). This is the first sculpture we did and as we learned to use this new sand with lots of clay and peddles we encountered a problem.

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What started as an elephant rolling his trunk became something quite different and silly fun.
The trunk was carved and it was time to move down to the head and body. The amount of clay in the sand made the trunk too soft and it collapsed under it's own weight. We saw cracks appear first and slowly open. Below is a shot of the proceedings.

We were left with a stump and as we usually do in these situations we stood back, thought should we begin again, or see if what we had left inspired ideas. With the already roughed out head and what was left of the trunk it was immediately clear that the sculpture wanted to be a pig after all, so we got to work making its wish our command.

I was quite amazed that there was such a simple solution to the problem. A bit of a nip and tuck to the ears and it was almost done. If Darwin himself was looking on he could have added it as a chapter to his book. Saying that this was the evidence he needed to prove that pigs evolved from Elephants. Ok, maybe not.

Like a pig in shite

Now all bets were off and we decided to just have fun with our little piggy. Because the head was in such an un-pig like pose we thought it looked like it was singing. This brought us in aother new direction. Make he a she, slap a microphone in her hooves and the rest of the story pretty much wrote itself, name included.

When finished we went on to carve the Apes , also Linked below.

Ps

I know that wasn't a great sculpture but please bare with me as I try to document all my work good and bad. Nina hasn't seen the light of day since I took these pictures all those years ago. She just wants to be remembered for what she was, a twig on the evolutionary tree of my work. Next time I will root out something a bit more impressive (I hope) so please visit my blog again. For now here are some of my recent posts.

Other De Spelerij Sculptures