This sculpture of an in-flight Tiger Swallowtail butterfly is over 5 feet across and was built with 37,481 LEGO pieces.

The sculpture was installed in April 2012 at Reiman Gardens in Iowa as part of my traveling exhibition, Nature Connects. In October 2012 it will travel to it’s next location, so stay tuned for updates!

Close-ups

Building it

The sculpture took over 250 hours to design and build. This turned out to be one of the most time-intensive sculptures I’ve ever built… because the whole sculpture is on a 45-degree angle, you only ever see a 1×1 corner of each brick… which meant it used a lot more pieces than I ever expected. (I ran out of yellow half way through!)

Each piece is glued one-by-one and a steel armature helps keep the sculpture secured to the ground. Working around diagonal steel bars with rectangular LEGO pieces is a lot harder than you’d think!

The sculpture was assembled in my New York City art studio, then custom-crated in a museum-quality exhibition crate for my new show, Nature Connects, which is currently touring the United States.

Wheeeeeeeee!!