Animal Tire Sculptures by Yong Ho Ji - Make Something Mondays

These animal-like tire sculptures just blew my mind!!! I keep looking at them in amazement. How did the artist, Yong Ho Ji, cut the tire so perfectly, and mold it so precisely, that it created a familiar creature. Holy cow, I can’t get over these! That is how you can tell he is a good artist. When you sit there and stare. There are a billion questions running through your mind, but you can’t come up with an answer to any of them. What he has created is so intriguing that you can’t take your eyes off of it, you can’t figure out how it works.

The tire sculpture process is an interesting one. First, the artists sculpts his form out of clay and wire. When the initial design is perfected, he makes a plaster mold and then, makes a resin sculpture. The tires are added afterwards.

Yong Ho Ji is a Korean artist. He was inspired to make tire sculptures because of a childhood memory of the spare tire on his family’s Jeep Wrangler. The jeep was symbolic of the distinct contrast to his rural home. It was the link between environment and industrialization.

So, the animal sculptures aren’t made entirely of tires, but they are still breathtaking.

Images ©  Yong Ho Ji