If you read my last post about beetle spreading, you’ll know I’ve been playing with the intersection of natural history and art of late. This isn’t totally new, but I haven’t been good at blogging for the last few years (thanks, grad school). Here’s a project from last year that I didn’t have time to share until now: a terrarium sculpture!

What’s a terrarium sculpture? I’m probably the only person who calls it this, but I can’t think of a better description for what it is: a glass container with a sculpture inside made of natural (or naturalistic) items.

There are a few curiosity shops I follow who make things similar to this, but I really wanted to use what I already had (see last year’s No Buy project). I went digging into my crafting bin (and sourced an old raccoon skull* from an antique store), and set about seeing what I could make!

Here is where I started: some driftwood I found as a kid and have carried around for years, some crafting moss from when I used to make fairy doors, some decorative acorns, a big chunk of amethyst I had lying around, and a hot glue gun. (It’s amazing what you can find if you go digging through what you’ve got, right? Or is this just me?)

The first step was figuring out how to get everything into the bell jar (which I found at Michael’s for about $8). I played around with several configurations and decided I wanted the whole thing to be more vertical.

Once I had the driftwood base in place, I tried the skull in a few places and found just the right spot for it along one side of the sculpture. I added some of the bright green moss and dried grasses around the base to cover where I’d glued everything.

The rest of the process was really just filling in the blank spaces. I added a couple of the acorns and nested the amethyst into the base of the piece. I also ran dried lichen (from the moss collection) up to the top of the piece to give it some balance.

So here’s the final piece, with the glass dome installed! I really love how it turned out, though I think I will add one of my recently done beetles to the top of the piece, sitting on the wood. I don’t know that I’ll make many of these, but for a one-off art piece, I think it came out pretty well!

*I always try to find ethically sourced items like this so that no animals die for me to have an art project. Antique stores are pretty good because most of the stuff you find is so old I don’t feel bad taking it home.