In the video below, Cassidy Powers talks with Clinton Lesh of Belgrade, who created a massive metal sculpture of a wooly mammoth which was recently displayed at the Burning Man festival.
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Last year, Lesh turned heads with a towering 12-foot jackalope. This year, his creation was even larger: an 8,000-pound woolly mammoth.
“The tusks — I made them bigger than historically they should be, but I think it turned out really well,” Lesh said.
Lesh has spent nearly a decade turning sparks and metal scraps into large-scale works of art. He earned a degree in art from Montana State University, where he forged a connection with renowned Montana sculptor Jim Dolan — creator of the “Blue Horses” in Three Forks and numerous other celebrated pieces across the state.
The jackalope Lesh created last year, was “kind of our Bigfoot of eastern Montana,” Lesh said. As a little kid you think, ‘oh, that’s pretty cool, I want to find one of those.’”
The jackalope was also Lesh’s first piece for Burning Man, the annual art festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
“Essentially 80,000 people show up to the desert where there’s nothing, and they build a city for a week. It’s all about radical self-expression and decommodification,” Lesh said.
About 75 large-scale works are commissioned each year, with a total of around $1 million in grants awarded to participating artists. Lesh was among those awarded for his mammoth, inspired by this year’s “Tomorrow and Today” theme.
“I wanted to stand out, so I looked into the past — dinosaurs, Ice Age animals. And I heard that they were cloning mammoths. And I was like, well, that’s kind of perfect,” he said.
The 12-foot tall, 22-foot long, four-ton mammoth took five months to build.
It's covered with more than 5,000 hand-welded metal “hairs,” and features trap doors revealing interior LED panels.
“I’ve got about 20 of these LED panels set up on the inside of here,” Lesh said.
Lesh tells me the hardest part about creating this mammoth was having to design the sculpture to split in half for travel to Nevada, with removable tusks as well.
“You get a lot of good looks going down the road,” Lesh said.
At Burning Man, the sculpture became a gathering spot.
“Ton of compliments,” Lesh said. “There was a couple that got married in front of the mammoth this year. They were like, ‘This is our favorite sculpture, so we decided to do our ceremony in front of it.’”
Materials were sourced entirely from Montana — its eyes from a Townsend glass blower, and stainless steel from a company in Billings.
“They’re very soft and add a soul to him, almost,” Lesh said of the glass eyes.
Representing his home state, Lesh said, felt significant.
“It’s an honor. A lot of people view Montana as this beautiful state with all these wonderful things going on, and then when you can bring art from Montana? They’re like, ‘Oh, they’ve kinda got it all up there,’” he said.
Lesh plans to return to Burning Man next year with another large-scale creature. If you were curious what Lesh does with these sculptures after Burning Man? He sells them! The jackalope now resides in New Mexico, while the mammoth is still for sale.
Last year, Lesh debuted his giant jackalope sculpture at Burning Man - watch the video:
