Look Out! There's A Snake!
About four years ago, I had this crazy idea to build a snake sculpture and put it on top of one of the red brick fences at Secret Garden. Almost straight away, I got some chicken wire and made four tubes, each about two meters long, and squeezed one of them into a pointed tail at the end. That was Step One. For the longest time, those skinny metal tubes sat around in the workshop, quietly waiting for Step Two to happen while higher priority projects, normal life, unusual dilemmas, and numerous obstacles went on around them.
This year, Step Two was finally assigned to the project list. The next phase of snake-building was to dip a bazillion strips of fabric into a cement slurry and wrap them around the wire frames and join all the frames together while simultaneously shaping the snake into a slithering sculpture that would fit neatly on the fence. There was measuring and shaping, building a life-size fence-top model to create the design on the ground, and figuring out the best way to create the head.
Around six years ago, a wonderful friend gifted me one of those wire head massagers that goes into your hair and makes your scalp all tingly. I used it for as long as I could but, unfortunately, in this high-humidity climate, metals tend to go rusty pretty quickly. Luckily, I never threw it away. Having inherited my Dad’s philosophy of “but it might come in handy one day” as an excuse to hang onto useless paraphernalia forever, the head massager hung around the workshop with the idle metal tubes. One day, I realized it would be a perfect skeleton for the shape of the snake’s head. And so it was. Wrapped in chicken wire and coated in cement-soaked strips of fabric, it came out beautifully. A visiting artist painted two rocks for the eyes.
The long forked tongue was also fashioned with a strip of chicken wire and covered in cemented fabric. “So where is all this fabric coming from?” I hear you ask. Well, I finally cleaned out my wardrobe. GASP! Yes… It’s ME! Throwing out old clothes! Can you even imagine that? I usually wear everything until it disintegrates. Haha! Anything that was too torn, too old, too ill-fitting, hadn’t been worn for a year, or needed new elastic went into a pile to be cut into strips. I was brutal with the clean-out. No mercy. The eight-meter-long snake sculpture needed my old clothes way more than I did.
On top of the fabric wrappings, another layer of cement was added. Egg cartons were soaked and molded into the bends to round them out and make the snake look more slithery. More fabric wraps were applied and another layer of thin cement slurry was applied over the top of it all. Now, the whole thing has to dry before it’s moved over to the fence. In this stormy weather, with lots of flooding in the surrounding region, the air is pretty heavy and humid so this could take a minute. It’s okay. I have plenty of time to wait.
The fantastic thing about this is, it’s not costing anything but time. I already had the wire and fabric (well, the old clothes) ready to go. There was also a bag of cement, a bag of tile adhesive, countless boxes of broken tiles, and several bags of grout in the storeroom left over from the bathroom project. This project keeps me busy, off the street, out of trouble, and is helping to combat the angst of failing to find a job despite weeks of gargantuan efforts. Several interminable power outages over a few days from 14-16 hours at a time have not slowed down the work. I don’t need electricity for this project.
Step Three is to get it on top of the fence then secure it to the bricks and tile it from head to tail. I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going. What do you think about my snake sculpture? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this latest art installation project if you could take a minute to comment below—or click the comment link to share your feedback. It might inspire me to create even more fantastical creatures in my garden in the future.