Building them

My assistant Geoffrey (above, left) took the design lead on the sculptures.  The mother took 700 hours to build, together with a team of 6 model builders over the course of 6 weeks.
The baby was built by David (below) over the course of 140 hours.

The legs were surprisingly complicated to build. When we designed the sculpture, the idea of “sort of randomly adding fuzzy texture” seemed like a good idea, but when it came time to build it we were going cross-eyed, It doesn’t’ help that black doesn’t visually read very well, which made it doubly hard to see what the heck we were doing.

Because this sculpture is installed outdoors, it needs to withstand the elements and overly curious visitors. We designed a steel skeleton to reinforce the structure which can additionally be bolted to the ground.

Working around steel can be really tricky, especially when you need to line up four legs and ensure that they’re all straight and “on the LEGO grid”? otherwise they won’t properly connect up at his belly. Gluing as we go, we don’t have the luxury to take things apart and tweak them, so we have to do a lot of drawing, planning, measuring and making-sure-we-get-it-right-the-first-time-ing.

Moo.