Dinosaurs, Motorcycles and Balloon Dresses: Inflatable Sculptures by Mark Verge

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Ballooning is also an art. And, as it turned out, monumental. Marc Verge's fun balloon sculptures feature life-size motorcycles, human-sized teenage mutant ninja turtles and huge inflated dinosaur skeletons. It is no wonder that with such a portfolio, Mark Verge is the winner of three world championships in creating sculptures from balloons.

"Culturology" has already written about several inflatable projects: copies of paintings by Larry Moss and outfits from multi-colored balls Daisy Balloon. Let's continue what we started.

Mark Verge, 43, from Ontario, Canada, first took up the balloon sculpture 16 years ago when he got his hands on a book about ball rotation. At first, everything turned out to be much more complicated than the novice sculptor thought: the balls were constantly trying to burst during the manipulations.

But over the years of practice, Mark Verge has learned to weave thousands of balloons of different sizes. In addition, he can create blindfold sculptures (this is how one of the motorcycles was made at a 1: 1 scale).

Mark Verge is a versatile personality, and his sculptures are diverse: here you have animals, clothes, cars and people. Since the master started with sculptures of various animals, he came up with a pseudonym for himself and became known to the local kids as Jungle Jack (Jack from the jungle).

The idea of sculpting something more monumental than ordinary cars and animals was born from the hobby of the globular sculptor for fossil animals. This is how Mark Verge got his "home" spinosaurus, stegosaurus and triceratops - all from balloons.

The largest inflated dinosaur skeleton in the Mark Verge collection is a 12-meter Tyrannosaurus rex made from 1,400 balloons. The sculptor coped with a difficult task in two and a half days. It was this exhibit that brought him victory at the 2007 World Championship.