Artist Transforms Car Wrecks into Giant Kangaroo

New Zealand artist Michel Tuffery is building a 4.5m high sculpture of a kangaroo from car body parts as part of a community project with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

In the car park of a shopping mall in the public housing estate of Airds, near Campbelltown, the larger-than-life bust of a kangaroo is starting to take shape.

With the help of engineers and a welder, Tuffery is taking car parts retrieved from a dozen or so burnt-out wrecks from surrounding bushland, and fusing the pieces together into one jaunty structure sealed from the elements.

“There’s a Laser, a Mitsubishi, a Toyota and a few bits of a Holden thrown in,” Tuffery says. “We’ve used car doors for the kangaroo’s ears. The locals are giving us amazing feedback and we get a big audience before and after school. We even have drive-bys, it’s hilarious, you get to know the cars.”

Tuffery is an artist of Samoan and Tahitian heritage famous for his 1994 life-sized work, entitled Pisupo lua afe or Corned beef 2000, constructed from flattened re-cycled corned beef tins.

Original article by Linda Morris, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 8, 2014.

Photo by Peter Rae.