Meet the artist creating life-size sculptures of endangered animals from cardboard

euronews (in English)

Placing sustainability at the core of his artistic practice, Josh Gluckstein captures the raw emotions of endangered animals through his life-sized animal sculptures.

Transcript

00:00Cardboard comes from everywhere, so it's always manufactured in slightly different ways.

00:05You have different tones of cardboard and different textures.

00:08Initially, such an exciting experience, tearing it and figuring out how I could use the corrugated

00:14cardboard to represent the flanges of an orangutan's face, or wrinkling paper to capture the depth

00:20and the wisdom of an elephant's skin.

00:39So I've always wanted to be an artist ever since I was a kid.

00:42My two passions have been animals and art.

00:45In school, I had quite a traditional portraiture background.

00:48I was doing life drawing, oil painting, and I fell in love with that.

00:52As the years went by in my education, I had another passion.

00:56I started to play around with found and recycled materials.

01:00On my way to school, I would see things and I would start to imagine manipulating them

01:05and turning them into something else.

01:12After university, I decided to travel for a year.

01:15Traveled all over Asia, spent an amazing four months in India, where I got the majority

01:20of my inspiration.

01:21And when I came home, made a whole portfolio about my experiences in India.

01:26And luckily, that show went well enough for me to go away again.

01:29And this time, I felt really excited about going to see animals in the wild, having more

01:33experiences like that.

01:35So set off to South America and Central America, volunteered in Costa Rica with howler monkeys

01:41and sloths, rehabilitating them.

01:43It was also a really important experience because when you think about seeing animals,

01:48you think, oh, it's going to be so exciting.

01:50It's going to be magical.

01:51But I think everywhere I went, there was a tinge of sadness at the fact that we have

01:58destroyed a lot of these ecosystems, specifically plastic waste.

02:02You can see almost anywhere in the world.

02:04I would dive in really remote places and you would still see coke cans and cigarettes and

02:09bottles on the shores.

02:10And you realize the extent of the damage we've done to our world.

02:14I think that's something that really informed my decision to work with cardboard.

02:22So I often work on five or six sculptures at the same time.

02:26The initial process is similar to how a child would make a balsa sculpture.

02:31It's slotting cardboard together to create cross sections to build a form.

02:35And then as the process nears its completion, I'm working with single layer cardboard,

02:41which is more malleable.

02:42And as I get to the finer details, I'm using paper and bits of magazines and torn pieces

02:48of cardboard and trying to capture those really fine details.

02:55I always want people to have an emotional connection with the animal.

02:58So those tiny details, the intensity of the eyes and the placement of the different characteristics

03:04is the thing that takes me the longest time and often be very close to finishing one piece.

03:08And then I just need to look at it for two weeks to figure out those tiny little details.

03:17I'm really delighted to say I've raised over £10,000 now for different wildlife conservation

03:21charities.

03:22I'm hoping to do a lot more.

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