Colossal: In Japan’s Niigata prefecture, cooler weather marks the advent of enormous straw creatures materializing from the fields and stalking the changing landscape. Every year around the rice harvest, art students repurpose the crop’s leftover straw, or wara, into mammoth characters for the Wara Art Festival. Recent editions have brought dragons, a bonsai-like tree, and the widely popular maneki-neko, or beckoning cat, to the autumn terrain.
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This article details how students in Japan use leftover straw from the rice harvest in order to make large sculptures. I think that this is some incredibly cool artwork that also manages to be sustainable at the same time. Having briefly worked on a farm before, I know how uncomfortable the texture of straw can be and how difficult it can be to make it do what you want, so I respect the amount of time that went into creating such detailed structures with such a difficult material. I think the art they are creating also shines a light on the fact that there are many materials out there, many of them much more sustainable than what we currently use, that could serve a similar or the same purpose as what do now. In the live entertainment industry, we generally assume that wood is the best for building flats, and metal for stronger structures. While this may very well be true, we are not often told to consider other alternatives that could be more environmentally friendly
Ok America, we are behind, hay mazes and corn mazes are over, and straw creatures are in. I genuinely love these! I mean did you see those creatures, the dragon especially was my favorite, how could anyone not love this! The answer is you can't, they are genuinely so cool and innovative. I find these particularly interesting because they are a medium that not many people work with in that large of a scale. Straw is mainly used for hay bails or smaller weaving, and the scale of these creations is incredibly large, yet they retain clean edges, and intricate details. I would love to visit Japan one day and this really solidifies my view, maybe I should during the fall season in order to see these guys! I love how every country has its own traditions that mean something to them and this has to be one of my favorites I’ve seen so far.
As soon as I opened the article and saw the giant straw sculptures I will admit that I went down a youtube and google rabbit hole to look at more of them. They remind me of when I used to make sculptures in my backyard out of the materials that I could find there. I love when people use what is considered to be unconventional art materials. I love these giant pieces so much because it serves as a fantastic reminder that you can truly make art out of anything if you have enough time and patience. The art is also an amazing way to show how we can reuse materials. I mean it is the straw that has been leftover from the harvest. If it could have been used for something else it would have been very little, so why not make it into a giant octopus that rises out of the ground for the sake of art? I will now be watching youtube videos on how these are made.
This is so cool. I can’t even imagine what the construction process for these creatures must be like, or how long it might take. Straw probably isn’t a very easy art material to work with, since the sculptures have to be constructed of bundles, and the straw can’t just be molded like clay. I don’t know much about straw, but I imagine it isn’t the sturdiest of materials, even when a ton of it is bunched together. I imagine that breakage is a pretty major concern. It looks like a lot of the bundles are tied together too, and I wonder if there’s a strategic balance between tying the bundles together enough so that they don’t fall apart, yet simultaneously, making sure it’s not too tight, possibly damaging the straw. I love the undersea theme. I think my favorite of the pictures shown in the article is the dolphins. I really like how they were crafted so that the ground acts as the water, with some of the dolphins only half visible above the surface.
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