INCREDIBLE GIANT SCULPTURE MADE OUT OF 70 THOUSAND INDIVIDUAL HAND MADE CERAMIC VASES

This enormous sculpture by Grégoire Scalabre is made up of 70,000 separate ceramic vases. The French artist used a traditional clod-turning technique to create each of these long-necked vessels by hand, spending several months building this one-of-a-kind tribute to the Greek sea nymph Thetis. He then freeformly arranged them on a sizable resin and foam structure to create an enthralling pattern that seems to move in front of the viewer's eyes.

Entitled The Final Metamorphoses of Thetis, the completed piece made its debut at the Porcelain Virtuosity exhibition, a component of the Homo Faber Event in Venice. Greek mythology describes Thetis as a sea nymph with remarkable transformational abilities. Scalabre tells My Modern Met that she transforms into a lion, snake, cuttlefish, fire, wind, tree, bird, or tiger, in that order.

"Honouring the Nereid Thetis, whom he envisions emerging from the ocean's depths, magnificently adorned in an array of tiny ceramic amphorae, in the illumination of Venice: her ultimate transformation," the artist writes. The tiny amphorae's restrained white and green colour scheme is intended to evoke the properties of water and minerals, reinforcing the mythological motif.

Despite the fact that each miniature ceramic vessel is only a few inches long, the sheer quantity of them allowed them to completely envelop the enormous sculpture, which is over three feet in diameter and six and a half feet high. Eighty per cent of the ceramic pieces were made by Scalabre himself; the remaining pieces were made by his studio assistants.

The miniatures were fired, and cooled, and then the artist improvised a way to attach them. He states, "It is a free composition with no preset pattern." Associating and contrasting shapes and colours from the palette gathered during firing is how this is done automatically. The parts are put together, they communicate with one another, and an apparent language emerges.