Snake: A Sculpture Worth Experiencing

Some sculptures are for viewing. You can see its beautiful with your eyes. Some sculptures are for touching. The gentle touch and feeling of the sculpture give the audience great pleasure. There is another type sculpture. It is for your experiencing. And this Snake sculpture, by Yong Ping Huang, is such a sculpture, which allows you to walk through its inside and view it from different perspective.

The most interesting part of the sculpture lays in its interaction between its surrounding: sea. The sculpture is installed coast along Nantes, France: which is well known for its beautiful view. When the tide arises, the snake would be immersion under sea level and emerge itself after the the tide retreat.

The sculpture is 490 feet long total. Its structure is made up of two major components: head and body. Its head is giant, with its mouth widely open, showing the aggressive nature of a snake. Its body is made up from numerous bone structure. The body layout in a beautiful and long curve along the costal. This make viewing it from different perspective a very pleasant experience.

Below is a brief description on how Tany Foundry casting this monumental sculpture in aluminum.

Step 1: Sculpture Enlargement
Artist creates a maquette We enlarge the sculpture to the desired size with CNC Milling technique.

Step 2: Sand Modeling

This sculpture is made with sand casting. From the technical perspective, one of the major difficulties is to make the size of the sculpture accurate because the bones have to be fit perfect with eath other. Otherwise, the shape would be distort and its artistic effect would fail. Sand modeling is the key step to make all these right at the first place.

Step 3: Aluminum casting

Since this sculpture is to be installed along coast, the aluminum alloy has to be of high corrosion resistance performance. We use A-G3T to fulfill this purpose. It works excellently even in the most hash environment: sea. Aluminum is capable of forming a very thin layer of oxidation wrapping its surface, which is can prevent further corrosion.

Step 4: Chasing and Finishing

One of the major reason that aluminum, as a material for sculpture, is not so often used like bronze is that it is very difficult to do welding. The aluminum oxidation will make the welding rods hard to perform. Only very experienced welders are able to make really high quality welding. We spent numerous hours on aluminum welding and finishing.