As a parent of young children, I enjoy exploring parental relationships found in nature.  This is a life-size sculpture of an emperor penguin caring for its baby chick.   Creating these kinds of sculptures with a children’s  plaything is especially poignant and, in my opinion, helps make the sculptures even more meaningful.

I intentionally anthropomorphize my creatures (just a little) which pairs nicely with the cartoon-like look of the flat color of LEGO bricks.  Together with realistic posing and the subtle stepping of the LEGO bricks, this creates a really nice visual aesthetic that somehow keeps my sculptures both true-to-nature and yet impossibly digital.

If you’d like to see more of my Nature-themed sculptures, they are currently traveling on exhibition in several countries around the world!  Take a look at the exhibit schedule to see if a show is coming soon near you.

Building them

The sculpture uses over 18,000 LEGO pieces and took a month and a half of full time work to design and build at my studio in Amsterdam.  It’s supported by a custom-fabricated welded steel armature, and every brick is glued piece-by-piece into place as the sculpture is created.  Only standard off-the-shelf everyday LEGO pieces were used, without any custom shapes or colors, and each is connected properly the way LEGO bricks are meant to be used.