Duck, Death, Tulip
This was a collaboration project inspired by the talented sculptor and illustrator, Marco Caruso.
This project was taken from the beautiful children’s story book, “Duck, Death and the Tulip” which was written and illustrated by Wolf Erlbruch.
Duck, Death, Tulip
By Marco Caruso
While researching children’s stories, Marco came to the realisation that a lot of our favourite and well known children’s stories have been adapted more and more over the years to diminish the idea of death. So he started looking into children’s stories where the main theme is understanding death, rather than avoiding it. He discovered a book called, “Heart and the bottle” by Oliver Jeffers which lead him to, “Duck, Death and the Tulip” by Wolf Erlbruch, as they both had similar concepts.
Marco found Wolf Erlbruch’s illustations unique and this inspired him to develop them into a 3D concept. He used this sculpt as his first experiment with casting; a method used to replicate a 3D piece of art work by making a mould of the sculpt and pouring in a liquid material which hardens and sets to the shape of the mould.
An edition of 10 sculpts have been made and with the first 10 sculpts that are sold you get a limited edition print made by myself. This lino print was my own interpretation from the story, featuring the duck as the main image holding the red tulip within his beak. I decided to depict death as a skeletoral structure of the duck, to signify that death is within us.
Marco and I had spoken about collaborating for a few years and we decided that this would make a good starting point to explore our own interpretations of this beautiful book. We really enjoyed working together on this project and plan to collaborate again in the near future.
