Creating the Wild Things jukebox – day 1

Here’s an update from Matthew and Cash, the artists who are creating the sculpture for our rhino head juke box project:

Matthew and I are to make a rhinos head for the wild things jukebox. The rhino head is the logo for wild things music. The idea was to use this huge powerful image of a rhino as a place/hook for the headphones, which will allow an audience to listen to their selected tracks on the jukebox.

I met at the Blue Room, Phoenix, in Brighton. This is the studio of the Rocket artists of which Matthew is one. I came with a trolley full of resources and images of rhinos, which I had collected from the Natural History Museum in London. We were keen to make the rhinos have their but during my recce I could see that there really was no space for this kind of activity. The Natural History Museum have 4 full-size rhinos and the baby. Some were larger than others but they were all still huge. They were black rhinos, which meant that they were grey in colour. We began by making drawings from the photographic images and video I’d made which we viewed on the computer. This gave us a sense of shape, form, and texture of the rhino.

We then made a paper pattern for a plywood inner structure. To aid our model making we had a small scaled model from the Natural History Museum to work from to help us get the correct dimensions.

Having drawn round the paper pattern on the plywood I cut it out with a jigsaw. We also needed a disc with a hole in it at the back of the head to enable us to attach it to the lid of the flight case. We added a few blocks and screws the extra strength and very strangely put the structure into a black bin bag with the task poking through the bottom, just like your rubbish does to annoy you. We tapped the bag to the structure to make a kind of rhino head shaped balloon. We adorned surgical gloves, sprayed water into the inside, then vigorously shook a can of insulating expanding foam for 30 seconds. We took turns to squirt, shake, and squirt again. The expanding foam gushed out expanding madly for a while, then it ran out of energy and kind of dribbled out with less gusto. When the can was finished we allowed the insulating foam to continue expanding and we manipulated the contents by pushing it around the balloon so that it was filling all the right places to create the rhino head shape.