Not as functional as they look.

Michael Tweedley likes ice climbing, and when one goes ice climbing it’s useful to have long steel spikes stuck to the boots, but apparently these crampons were not so well designed, so Michael rather handed them in to the repair shop than have them fall off his boots while dangling high up from a cliff-side. I think that was very smart. When Michael came in with them, we both got joking about how aggressive and macho they looked, and decided there and then that I should try to soften them up a bit. To me they really looked like teeth, so the next step felt sort of obvious.

Soft and sharp at the same time.

I got the teddy from a pound store, and got tinkering with a simple mechanism with a bite. The teddy head is stuffed, but the jaws are made of plywood and spring-loaded. I stuck the head on a board, like a hunting trophy, but to me he is very much still alive, as alive as a teddy bear get anyway.

Teeth, trap or dental guard?

Artworks that rely on a contrast of ideas or images play with our expectations, and the most important thing is to get the meeting of opposites right, so that people see both the separate entities and the collision of them at the same time. Even more important however, and often overlooked, is the feel and character the sculpture is shaped with. All the small, subtle details that make up the final form all contribute to the associations the audience will get. In the case of Bear trap, I personally found it really important that not only the spikes were visible, but also the short steel lips designed to hold the heel of the boot, which I chose to display a bit like if the crampons were not really the teeth of the bear, but rather some kind of dental guard or muzzle. The image reminds me of the muzzle strapped on Hannibal Lecter’s face in Silence of the Lambs. Maybe the teddy was once an ordinary cuddly soft toy, but for some cruel reason the steel teeth were forced upon him and he turned into a monster.

Spring-loaded teddy jaws.

Object no. 38