Cute... or sinister?

The hand carved wooden elephants we got from Liz Armitage were your typical gift shop inhabitants, either in a zoo or park of some kind, or brought home from a trip abroad of course. They had been a present, but although surely well intended, she never took to them. -They are ugly, and their eyes are scary! she claimed, and after a quick inspection I had to give her right. Could it be that the loveless conditions under which they had been carved, in some third world craft industry aimed at tourists, had infused itself into the core of the creatures created there? Anyway, they were justly deemed too creepy for the bookshelf. But instead of trying to erase the elephants unwholesome attitudes, I decided to run with it.

A definite improvement of the creepy eyes.

Making a small sculpture that is genuinely unsettling is actually really difficult, so when you happen to run into one where half the job has already been done, surely you would only want to enhance it. I figured if I transformed the figure from representing an animal beloved and sought out by tourists in the tropics, into one westerners going south mostly try to avoid, I might be on the right track.

Is it the name of a large spider, or an eight legged elephant?

I wanted to keep as much of the hand carved aesthetic as possible, so I just cut the spider body out of the elephant, and then added three extra pairs of legs. The symbolical implications of an elephant spider are interesting for me. Think of the renowned memory of the elephant, his size and majesty, and how they live to very old age. And then the shadow existence of spiders, hiding out in nooks and crannies, staying out of plain view, waiting patiently for its prey, ubiquitous to any environment, always hiding in some shadow of human habitation. Sounds a bit like guilt maybe, or family secrets.

What's the secret of the Elephant Spider?

As a sculpture it is also interesting. Is a carving like this a representation of an imaginary animal, or of tourist handicraft? Or is it a symbolical representation of a power relationship or economical force that were behind the creation of the carving in the first place? I think it can inhabit several of these positions at the same time, but I also think that a figurative sculpture like this points at the complex of an art world sometimes uncomfortable with simple figuration, in a world full of non artistic figurative sculpture and imagery, in toys, media and advertising.

If you catch her scuttling over your bathroom floor at night, maybe a rolled up newspaper won't be enough?

Object no. 24