Building an ostrich out of lighters, cards and buttons

What do you do when you want your own ostrich but don’t know where to get one? Exactly, you build one yourself.

Pet is a Dutch artist who collects collections. He has a full storage house with many cubic meters of stuffed animals in all the colors of the rainbow, countless Barbies, boxes full of egg holders, massive amounts of cards and black and white photos, boxes full of old cassette tapes and much much more. It is like the ultimate kid’s playground. We as the Big Bug Collection collaborated with Pet. He let us use any material we wanted to build something that preferably would fit within his Robinson Crusoe themed exhibition.

Tomas and I decided to make an animal for the island, and an ostrich seemed like a fun quirky animal to build. We used a wooden frame and chicken wire for the structure, cards as feathers, lighters for the legs and neck, yellow Kinder Surprise toy shells for the paws, a wooden shoe for the beak, egg holders and light bulbs for the eyes and buttons to cover his head.

Every once in a while I start a project that while I am at it, I think to myself ‘what on earth did I get myself into?’ Like when your fingers have multiple burns from attaching buttons with a glue gun and you have been tying hundreds of lighters with iron wire for hours straight. But then everything is finished and you would do it all again. I think good projects have a tension between fun and frustration. Sometimes you need to push yourself to achieve awesome things. Only then you accomplish things you didn’t know you could. Only with real effort and hard work you can really appreciate your accomplishments.

Do you agree? Have you ever felt a combination of fun and frustration in the process of a project?