Whale Installation

This large whale sculpture was created for our themed camp at Ignition festival in Matamata. The tail alone is 7.5 metres wide and stands 4 metres in the air.

This project began when myself and a friend paired up to create a themed camp for this festival. It was our mission to bring the container for ocean-conservation awareness to this festival. Alongside inviting incredible DJ’s to play, we hosted multiple talks from experts in ocean-related fields.

35 people later and with almost $10,000 raised, we delivered the largest soundsystem/ sound camp and largest single art installation at this 1000 person festival in the North Island.

This was an epic project that provided a lot of learnings for me in:

• Design, construction and transport logistics for a large installation. The sculpture was designed and manufactured by myself here in Ōtautahi and transported on a trailer to the middle North Island

• Delegating and building on site. As construction lead I offered direction and support to our awesome team of 30 as we constructed this, as well as our bar (constructed from recycled ocean and ocean-bound plastic) and the rest of our camp infrastructure

• herding cats, gaining camp members and pulling together resources and equipment from the community in order to organise as much as possible ahead of time, as well as organising a fundraiser party to boost our budget

• Budgeting and financial management (I also served as treasurer)

This was an open ended design that started with the idea to have people dancing “inside the whale”.

I chose a panelized design because of my familiarity with CNC-machined profiles and the high time and weight efficiency and flat-packability of the process in creating large structures, as well as the unique aesthetic appeal.

I decided to learn how to use Rhino 3D (3D modelling software) with the Grasshopper extension for this project. It was a steep learning curve, but allowed me to make real time changes that updated parametrically. I can now take any shape, input it into the software, and the workflow will automatically generate the triangulated/panelized shape, offset the panels, radius corners, and add aligned bolt holes and unique identifier text so that the profiles can simply be sent to a CNC CAM software package to be cut.

I decided to connect the panels with custom designed laser cut, bendable and uniquely aesthetic 3mm galvanized steel connectors. The magic of these is that the same connector can be used to connect adjacent panels of any angle. T-nuts (hammered into the plywood) were used to fasten connectors tight using 8mm bolts.

Total construction cost of this Whale was ~3k nzd. The rest of our budget was used for other camp infrastructure, food for 30 people, sound system and marquee hire and transport costs.

In total, 30 full sheets of 12mm plywood, 240 connectors, 480 bolts and T-nuts, and 70 metres of framing timber were used, as well as hundreds of screws.

This structure is designed to be re-used and rapidly assemblage/disassemblable. I will be creating a steel frame structure to replace the framing timber structure we used on this occasion in order to increase lifetime/repeatability and reduce assembly time and total weight. The two halves can also be repositioned to create a different style of installation.

This was an awesome project and I feel very fortunate to have had the support of many people to make it a reality.