These enormous immovable slug sculptures are called ” Slowslugs ” and are made of steel , netting and 40 ,000 recycled plastic bags . They were made for the Accroche Coers Festival in Angers, France and they were up for 10 days , Sept 7 to 17 , 2012 . The artist is Dutch street artist Floretijin Hofmann .
The slugs are placed so that they appear to be crawling slowly up the hills of Angers toward the towns’ big Catholic church . They are meant to symbolize mortality , religion , natural decay and the slow suffocation of commercial society .
Ok . This image of these gigantic plastic bag slugs appeared suddenly , mysteriously and annoyingly with out any information on Facebook and it is my holy quest to document these sort of things . I thought it was an astonishing sculpture , heavy and ponderous and also light , silly , childish and scary . The artist Florentijin Hofman has made many of these cheerful , goofy and overwhelming outdoor animal installations – the most well known is probably ” Rubber Duck ” in Osaka harbor , Japan in 2009 .
Hofman and his interns work for months on his outdoor sculptures and they are often up for only a few days . He tells his interns that in the end they will only remember the completed art and the time of work will fade out of mind .
His motto is ” Work Big ! ”
He also likes to use local materials and objects that are very familiar and normal to the viewer like the flip flops he used to make ” Fat Monkey ” for the Pixelshow Conference in Sao Paulo in 2012 . The flip flops are his reference to pixels .
Work on this scale with such confidence , playfulness and swagger gives a real rush of energy to create . It lets us see yarnbombing street art in the context of other art made to be outside , made to be interacting with people unexpectedly , art made to be put up for a short time and then taken down . { My favorite story about people interacting with his art unexpectedly was that a woman in Osaka stopped to take a picture of ‘ Rubber Duck ” and her car drove into the harbor . }
This is a quote of Florentijin Hofman that is interesting :
” That’s how my work comes full circle: you change a public space by adding something new, then you change it back again by taking it out which is when you start to miss it. It really changes how people perceive public space. I can tell you countless stories of activists collecting signatures to keep the artwork in place, but like I said, missing it is part of the concept! ”
Streetcolor 
omfg that giant DUCK. best ever.