Spring semester, March 2025
Wire sculpture

This project was divided into two parts: First, designing an animal made up of parts from at least 3 different insects or small animals. After drawing a blueprint of the bug, we used it to create a wire sculpture.

For my design I combined the body of one beetle (cerambyx cerdo) with the head and antennae of another (platycerus caraboides), the chelicerae of a spider (atypus affinis), the arms of a gecko, and the legs of a lizard.

My beetle–the Jumping Beetle–is a carnivorous beetle that hunts smaller bugs. Its small legs cannot support the weight of its body well, so it crawls, but once it locates its prey, it uses its powerful back legs to leap forward, and impales its victim with its fangs.

The creepy crawly project brought me out of my comfort zone by having me work with a material I was unfamiliar with. Wire is very thin, and as opposed to the wide, flat paper we used for the previous project, it made me think of this 3D sculpture as lines tied together that create volume. It brought together my understanding of 2D and 3D in that way.