DEscription
Sheila is modeled after a dire wolf, a prehistoric canine that used to roam this continent. Fossil records inform us that a dire wolf was only slightly larger than modern-day wolves. Our wolf was designed to be larger than life at roughly 12 feet tall. Her bones are made of reclaimed steel and her “skin” is made of the decommissioned gutters of the studio where she was built. Sheila reminds us of what was on this land before we humans hunted them to extinction. She is located in an area that will soon be a dog park, allowing dogs and their owners to connect to their ancestors in a unique and fun way.
Sheila has a complex and beautiful story.
We truly believe that every object has its story and that remembering and honoring these stories is a key point of reconnection to our material world. Here we offer what we can of the story of Sheila’s body, while also honoring that the history of each object goes beyond these stories, what we know and what we can comprehend.
Her first form was originally created for Maker Faire 2018. This first iteration was made out of reclaimed wood that was used to form the bodies of two bighorn sheep sculptures Joel had created in 2015 for the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in collaboration with Shrine On. They subsequently traveled and appeared at multiple other festivals through 2016. The bighorn sheep sculptures were destroyed by vandals at a northern California location where they had been staged for public display in 2017. The artists reclaimed their bodies and decided to create a wolf out of the remnants of the sheep making her literally a “wolf in sheep's clothing”
After her debut at Maker Faire, Sheila sat in the artist’s studio serving as their energetic guard dog for many years. When 2020 came around and the whole world halted, the artist slowly started to retrofit Sheila’s body with scrap metal they had collected from a variety of sources. Most notably, a lot of her bones were created from steel left over from a prototype of a mobile solar desalination plant that a studio mate was working on with Give Power energy.
As we worked on reframing the skeleton, our community home was being reroofed. We collected all the gutters that were decommissioned from the renovation and started playing with ways to sculpt them. We soon realized that this would be the perfect material for Sheila’s new skin. We were losing their studio and the community project they had been part of since 2018 was falling apart, so it only seemed fitting to transform that energy and give it to the guard dog that had been with them through the entire phase. Transforming her wooden body into an armor of steel seemed appropriate, not only for its outdoor durability but to protect it from any future vandalism.
