Fun Fact #1: The name LEGO® is derived from two Danish words “Leg Godt” which mean “Play Well”.
Fun Fact #2: Judging from his award-winning LEGO art exhibitions, artist Sean Kenney knows how to play well!
LEGO enthusiasts in the USA Southeast are fortunate to have had access to two of Sean Kenney’s exhibitions recently:
. Sean Kenney’s Nature Connects® was on display at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in Gainesville this past spring. The exhibition featured 15 amazing sculptures constructed entirely of LEGO bricks.
. Sean Kenney’s Nature POP®! is on display at Zoo Atlanta until early August. The exhibition features 40 LEGO sculptures with an unexpected twist.
Both exhibitions draw upon the way LEGO bricks connect to emphasize the interconnectivity of nature. They “challenge guests to consider: just as LEGO bricks interconnect, how is everything in nature interconnected?”
I had the pleasure of visiting both of these exhibitions and I’d like to share a few highlights in today’s blog post.
One of the first LEGO sculptures to greet visitors to the Nature Connects exhibition was a stunning, larger-than-life peacock. With its striking pose and vibrant colors, it was one of my favorite pieces. Viewing the sculpture from a few steps away, one would never guess it was constructed from LEGO bricks.
A closer look, however, reveals the familiar LEGO pieces and their blocky surfaces.
There are, as reported on the accompanying exhibit card, 68,827 bricks in this structure which took 625 hours to build. The Number of LEGO Bricks and Total Hours to Build were reported for all the LEGO sculptures on display. I overheard quite a few visitors discussing these data points and marveling at the effort involved.
This hummingbird sculpture, considered the centerpiece of the exhibition, is awe-inspiring. It is amazingly realistic with the hummingbird appearing to hover over the orange trumpet flower. The sculpture stands over eight feet tall!
Anyone who has ever played with LEGO is bound to wonder how this sculpture was made. I found an explanation in an Imagine Exhibitions’ interview with Sean Kenney. When asked about going from inspiration to creation, he replied “Each sculpture can have a different process. For example, the design of my “Hummingbird and Trumpet Flower” sculpture in [the] Nature Connects show just “popped” in my head the minute someone said “hummingbird.” I immediately had this vision of something that you could actually walk under, suspended as if by magic. Creating a spindly little nose and paper-thin wings built out of chunky LEGO pieces seemed like a wonderful challenge and, if done right, something that would look amazing. I spent about 4 weeks designing and planning this specific piece; researching images of hummingbirds in nature, choosing the perfect colors and designing the internal steel reinforcements, then about 5+ weeks building it.”
The below gigantic dragonfly sculpture was sensational. It is a Roseate Skimmer, “one of North America’s most beautiful large dragonflies … only the male is rosy-purple with dark red eyes, a purple thorax, and rosy pink-red abdomen.”
This dragonfly, along with all the other LEGO sculptures, was built in the artist’s New York City studio and shipped to the exhibition location. When asked “How are you able to make your sculptures structurally sound enough to withstand shipping, weather, and other unpredictable events involved with traveling exhibitions?”, Kenney answered “I work with a staff of artists in my studio who help me with my creations. Each sculpture is fully glued, steel reinforced, custom-crated, and designed to tour and last for the ages.
Even before a single LEGO brick is placed, my team and I do a lot of design work to figure out what the sculpture is going to look like and how it can physically work. We scrawl drawings on scraps of paper, gesture wildly, wield tape measures, hold metal bars with LEGO pieces glued to them pretending to be gravity, and all kinds of other crazy things that you do when you’re planning such a large endeavor.
It’s a lot of hard work for us to build the sculptures as sturdy and efficiently as possible, working around metal that’s welded slightly imperfectly, dealing with things getting too heavy or large horizontal things that want to crack in half, interlocking bricks as tightly as possible, building support beams inside, and all kinds of other physical hurdles.
But, working on large projects is my favorite thing to do! They’re the most fun of all, because they require a lot of creative planning, a lot of building, and they always end up creating a big “wow” for both parents and kids.”
Knowing these sculptures are reinforced with steel, I examined the dragonfly very carefully for evidence of internal supports and was able to spot a small section of metal between the body and wing.
This spectacular monarch butterfly is sitting on a milkweed bloom. As explained on the exhibit card “The monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) depends on milkweed (Asclepias sp.) as a food source for its larvae, known as caterpillars. Monarch numbers are in decline due to a number of factors, including the decline of milkweed throughout the range. You can help conserve monarchs by planting native milkweed species and limiting pesticide use in your garden.” This is a great example of how, as a Smithsonian Magazine article puts it, “Sean Kenney’s works of art often call attention to endangered species and advocate for conservation”.
That same article goes on to discuss how lifelike Kenney’s sculptures appear to be. “One of the biggest challenges is trying to get the softness of [an animal’s] features and the expressiveness of the face right while using what is otherwise a very blocky, low-resolution medium,” he says. “To me, that’s one of the most fun things to overcome. When you’ve done it, you’ve really done it. You step back and are proud of it.” This deer doe and fawn are a case in point.
A gardening scene, complete with a grandfather planting, granddaughter watering (shown below) and wheelbarrow, drove home the message about the need to connect with nature. The exhibit card explained “Digging in the soil, watching plants grow from seeds, caring for plants and harvesting food from plants are fun, healthy and rewarding activities. Gardening is a great way to experience nature in an up close and personal way. Studies have long documented the powers of gardening when it comes to physical and mental health. Horticulture therapy often is used as a way to heal the body and soul. Did You Know? Gardening reduces the chance of heart attack and stroke.”
These Nature Connects’ sculptures were amazingly lifelike. Obviously, a great deal of attention was paid to the sculptural details including the use of color. As a result, seeing the second exhibition, Sean Kenney’s Nature Pop!, was a delightful surprise—the sculptures have the same realistic details but the colors are bold and deliberately unrealistic.
This Galápogos tortoise, for instance, is “typically colored to match its mud-colored surroundings” but rendering the sculpture “in bright red draws attention to its domed shape and massive size.”
In the midst of Covid-19, according to Smithsonian Magazine, Kenney was “dreaming up a ‘colorful, punchy and playful’ exhibition called ‘Nature POP’ that gives the natural world a new spin.” At the time, he shared his vision, “Imagine a lawn full of giant bunny rabbits in polka dots and stripes, or a neon-blue woodpecker on a lava-lamp tree trunk.” The woodpecker is just as amazing as Kenney promised. “The swirls of red, yellow and orange contrast with the monochromatic cyan woodpecker and transforms the tree bark into a lava lamp.” says the exhibit sign.
Zoo Atlanta announced “Art meets science meets engineering in the eye-popping work of artist Sean Kenney – inviting you to reimagine the amazing complexities and interconnections of the wild world in fresh, fun, and unexpected ways. Expect to find startling bursts of color and boundary-blurring feats of innovation as you encounter works of sculptural art throughout the Zoo.”
The Nature Pop! exhibition illustrates the wide spectrum of color in which LEGO pieces are made. Interestingly, the LEGO palette has evolved over time—new colors are introduced while old colors are discontinued. From what I could find, LEGO pieces are currently available in 67 different colors. I wonder how many of those colors are used in this sculpture of a Dodo Bird.
The signs for this exhibition invite visitors to “Think Like an Artist” and to “Think Like a Scientist”. This sign reads:
“Think Like an Artist: The colored striping on this dodo bird evokes a sunset … projected onto the dodo’s body—a visual metaphor for the extinction of the species. Think Like a Scientist: Though often portrayed as clumsy and awkward, dodos were aptly evolved for their habitat in Mauritius. Strong legs enabled them to maneuver quickly. Long, hooked beaks allowed them to defend themselves.”
A majestic polar bear sculpture, depicting a mother bear with three cubs, is constructed of 112,450 bricks and took 389 hours to build. “The blue striping of the polar bear evokes the strata of a core of ice, as if the bear itself were forged from a glacier. This symbolizes the loss of the polar bears’ habitats and the receding glaciers of the Arctic.”
A delightful collection of LEGO rabbit sculptures, executed in a variety of poses and unexpected colors and patterns, is on display throughout Zoo Atlanta.
“Think Like an Artist: This whimsical and quirky collection displays many differently colored and patterned rabbits. In nature, rabbits’ colors and patterns vary, but not quite this dramatically. Think Like a Scientist: Naturally occurring colors and patterns of rabbits include lilac, opal agouti, orange, frosted pearl, black, blue tortoiseshell, silver fox and sandy.”
Kenney takes pride in the fact he uses only standard LEGO pieces that are available to everyone. “None of my sculptures are made with special Lego bricks,” he says. “I use the same ones that children play with.” One Nature Connects announcement put it this way “Kenney uses only standard, off-the-shelf, commercially available LEGO® pieces for his sculptures – no special colors or shapes. Each piece is connected to another, and the sculptures are built within the rules of the LEGO system.”
The golden dragonfly sculpture shown below may look familiar—it’s similar to the Roseate Skimmer from the Nature Connects exhibition—but the fanciful colors give it an entirely different appearance. The exhibit card notes “This dragonfly is composed of five sculptures: each wing is its own sculpture attached with a piece of metal on the diagonal. The artist used a photograph of a dragonfly where light shone through the wings to make the veins visible; this was replicated through texturing with LEGO bricks and highlights the connection between the veins and the body.”
Kenney’s website describes him as “a renowned, award-winning artist and ‘professional kid’ who uses LEGO pieces to design and create contemporary sculpture”. It seems to me, the professional kid is most apparent in this black-and-white zebra with an orange bow tie and playful horizontal stripes instead of realistic vertical ones.
When asked how long he’s been building with LEGO bricks, Kenney, the professional kid, replied “I’ve been building and playing with LEGO toys my whole life, but I’ve been building LEGO models professionally since 2005. I was a total ‘LEGO maniac’ when I was a kid, and LEGO toys were usually the only toys I ever asked for when my birthday would come around each year. I kept building LEGO models all through childhood and even into my teenage and adult years. What I love about LEGO toys is that they’re just so intrinsically fun and whimsical… I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone look at my work and frown.” I have to agree—his LEGO sculptures make everyone smile!
More Info
You can learn more about Sean Kenney via the below links:
. Sean Kenney website which includes behind-the-scenes videos and an exhibition schedule
. This Artist Uses Thousands of LEGO® Bricks to Make Lifelike Sculptures of Animals – Smithsonian Magazine article
. An Interview with Sean Kenney, Artist Who Works With LEGO® Bricks – Imagine Exhibitions Blog post
Sean Kenney’s Nature Connects® was on display at the Atlanta Botanical Garden Gainesville location from March 4 to May 30, 2022.
Sean Kenney’s Nature POP®! is on display at Zoo Atlanta from May 13 to August 8, 2022. You can learn more on the Zoo Atlanta website.
Check out the LEGO website to see the latest and greatest developments in the world of LEGO Group including news on their upcoming 90-year anniversary celebrations.
Today’s Takeaways
1. LEGO bricks are a surprisingly effective art medium.
2. Larger-than-life replicas of birds and insects add wonder and charm.
3. Rendering recognizable forms in unexpected colors can make artwork pop.
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