Horsing around

Everyone who applauded the giant moose initiative, on Vithatten mountain in Sweden, will be delighted to hear that the UK has the opportunity to have its own oversized animal in a landscape. Mark Wallinger, ex horse painter and Turner Prize winner, is proposing a white horse to overlook the Ebbsfleet Valley. At 33 times life size it will kick Moose butt.
Images: Mark Wallinger's big horse on a hill concept. Bottom, moose

Oh deer

Seriously, the world of sculpture doesn’t get any better than this.

You are looking at a 45m tall, 47m long moose that will hold up to 350 people. It is to be built on the top of Vithatten mountain in northern Sweden. The people of Vithatten are claiming it as the largest moose in the world. Meanwhile, the people of Wellington are asking their Sculpture Trust, “Where’s our moose?”

Taking the meer out of meercat

In its relentless search for oversized realistic animal sculptures OTN has discovered cloud breakers in the form of horses, moose and deer. Drawn to the conclusion that it was some kind of psychic marriage between man and hooves, we abandoned the search for the fabled 60-metre high guinea pig. Now a reader has presented a clear winner in the giant animal sculpture and what's more it's in the rare combustible material category. This Meercat stands at 36 feet high and, in case you think it is a mindless one-off, our OTN operative tells us that Chris Sadler and his wife Cheryl have been coming up with straw sculptures since 1998. Thanks R

Other OTN large animal sculpture stories here

Game’s on

There are two competing teams in Wellington’s Sculptural smack down. In the red corner is the Wellington Sculpture Trust, earnest proselytisers for high art to denote a cultural Capital. In the blue corner stands Weta Workshop, brash enthusiasts who see art as popular culture in its own right. The Trust believes in promoting established artists like Dawson, Moore, Drummond and Lye while Weta is convinced its own skills are more than up to the job of creating cultural monuments. And so from Weta and its staff Wellington has already got the Louise Bourgeois-like Spider in Courtenay Place and a couple of naked guys on the waterfront. 

Now Wellington is about to debate a Weta proposal for giant footy players to mark the 2011 Rugby World Cup. This latest scheme is backed by Wellington’s Mayor Kerry Prendergast, someone who knows a major contributor to her city when she sees one. 

The proposed sculpture is five metres high (as a rough guide it would take ten of them stacked on top of one another to equal the height of Sweden’s proposed giant moose) and is budgeted at $350,000 to be picked up by Wellington ratepayers. Prendergast has told the NZ Herald that, "Art always invites debate but I am hoping that the majority of Wellingtonians will see that this legacy is more than just about rugby." The Weta people, more pragmatically, announced, "It will be a massive construction job with probably up to 30 people working on it at any one time…" 

The proposal is to go up for public consultation. It will be interesting to hear the Wellington’s institutional art leaders stand, in particular the members of the Wellington City Council Public Art Panel (you can see who they are here) will have to say.

Big, bigger, biggest

The UK is continuing in its determination to be home to the world’s tallest sculptures. The latest addition dwarfs Gormley’s The Angel of the North by three times and makes the Statue of Liberty look like a doll holding a lamp and a book. Designed by architect Ken Shuttleworth (aka by his friends as, “Ken the Pen”) as a destination attraction, Aspire is a 60 metre tower commissioned by Nottingham University. The benefactor has [insert your own reason here] remained anonymous. We’ve already posted on the UK’s response to Sweedish attempts to snatch the world’s tallest animal sculpture in the form of a colossal moose. We will give you giant horse reports from the UK as they come to hand.

No idea

Ok it’s not a moose, but following up OTN’s research project on the history of large animal sculpture, here is a giant deer from way back.

Minor Lisa

With posts on giant sculptures of moose, horses, hands etc you have come to think of OTN as the place where big is always better. Here to fly in the face of all that sculptural showing off is the smallest reproduction of the Mona Lisa ever. The tree-trunk-kind-of-thing you can see is a human hair the painting 25,000 times smaller than the one in the Louvre. The method? Heating a needle on an atomic-force microscope. But you knew that.

It’s a guy thing

The giant, the outdoors and artistic ambition always finds a place here (giant moose, oversized horse etc.) and so this report on mega man, the “iconic tall emblem structure” planned for the Zaabeel Technology Theme Park in Dubai. The park is already cram-packed with sculptures throwing water around, spinning and reaching high into the sky, but the latest project proposed is a way-oversized statue of a storyteller (al hakawati). Courtesy of its own elevator, this colossus of rides will allow people to travel up to its head which can move, as can its arms. This is all the result of a competition to design a statue based on al hakawati and a profession (storytelling) that goes far back into the region’s history. In a stunning mix of branding, the competition was funded by ThyssenKrupp, two names familiar to art followers and lovers of war movies. We will keep OTN readers informed should this wild idea ever make it into production.