Squidgie!

This is Squidgie. I made him as a visual response (our first assignment of the new college year) to a culture event. The event I went to was the Dublin Contemporary Art Exhibition at Earlsfort Terrace.

 I'd read about a set of sculptures in particular interested me by a German-based artist named David Zink Yi. He created a series of sculptures in the likenesses of dead giant squids. Looking like tons of dead animal protein, Zink Yi’s giant squid is in fact a 660-pound ceramic object, surrounded by a pool of blue ink. He used a mixture of lead and copper glazes to create a varied metallic sheen on each of his ceramic colossal cephalopods.

On a separate note, I've tried to see the preserved giant squid in the natural history musuem in London twice now, but have yet to see it.  The squid is kept in a non-public area of the musuem, so you even have to pre-book places on the tour. The first time, the tour guide called in sick, so the tour didn't take part. The second time, the whole area was being re-vamped, so again, I didn't get to see it. Third time lucky hopefully!

The thing that interested me about this piece, is that though it a piece of art, it also represents reality too, as we only ever see giant squids when they die and wash up onto our shores.  Zink Yi’s piece allows us to feel a sense of how someone who found one of these creatures on the beach might have felt. It is no wonder that many myths and folklore were influenced by these finds.

As I looked at the piece, I couldn’t help but feel that is was a waste to have merely recreated reality, when creating an animated squid would have been much more fun. One of the great things about animation is the worlds and characters you can create are limitless, so my visual response was to create an illustration that shows a giant squid being friendly with a human diver. I also created the worst animation known to man to accompany it.

Finally, I called him Squidgie, as this is how my nephew pronounces squid, and its super cute.