Placing sustainability at the core of his artistic practice, Josh Gluckstein captures the raw emotions of endangered animals through his life-sized animal sculptures.
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00:00Cardboard comes from everywhere, so it's always manufactured in slightly different ways.
00:05You have different tones of cardboard and different textures.
00:08Initially, such an exciting experience, tearing it and figuring out how I could use the corrugated
00:14cardboard to represent the flanges of an orangutan's face, or wrinkling paper to capture the depth
00:20and the wisdom of an elephant's skin.
00:39So I've always wanted to be an artist ever since I was a kid.
00:42My two passions have been animals and art.
00:45In school, I had quite a traditional portraiture background.
00:48I was doing life drawing, oil painting, and I fell in love with that.
00:52As the years went by in my education, I had another passion.
00:56I started to play around with found and recycled materials.
01:00On my way to school, I would see things and I would start to imagine manipulating them
01:05and turning them into something else.
01:12After university, I decided to travel for a year.
01:15Traveled all over Asia, spent an amazing four months in India, where I got the majority
01:20of my inspiration.
01:21And when I came home, made a whole portfolio about my experiences in India.
01:26And luckily, that show went well enough for me to go away again.
01:29And this time, I felt really excited about going to see animals in the wild, having more
01:33experiences like that.
01:35So set off to South America and Central America, volunteered in Costa Rica with howler monkeys
01:41and sloths, rehabilitating them.
01:43It was also a really important experience because when you think about seeing animals,
01:48you think, oh, it's going to be so exciting.
01:50It's going to be magical.
01:51But I think everywhere I went, there was a tinge of sadness at the fact that we have
01:58destroyed a lot of these ecosystems, specifically plastic waste.
02:02You can see almost anywhere in the world.
02:04I would dive in really remote places and you would still see coke cans and cigarettes and
02:09bottles on the shores.
02:10And you realize the extent of the damage we've done to our world.
02:14I think that's something that really informed my decision to work with cardboard.
02:22So I often work on five or six sculptures at the same time.
02:26The initial process is similar to how a child would make a balsa sculpture.
02:31It's slotting cardboard together to create cross sections to build a form.
02:35And then as the process nears its completion, I'm working with single layer cardboard,
02:41which is more malleable.
02:42And as I get to the finer details, I'm using paper and bits of magazines and torn pieces
02:48of cardboard and trying to capture those really fine details.
02:55I always want people to have an emotional connection with the animal.
02:58So those tiny details, the intensity of the eyes and the placement of the different characteristics
03:04is the thing that takes me the longest time and often be very close to finishing one piece.
03:08And then I just need to look at it for two weeks to figure out those tiny little details.
03:17I'm really delighted to say I've raised over ÂŁ10,000 now for different wildlife conservation
03:21charities.
03:22I'm hoping to do a lot more.