Leela's Dragon

For more than a year, maybe two, Leela has been working on an ambitious multi-media yard-art project. It’s a dragon of Asiatic persuasion. She’s been through much uncertainty and anxiety over it (breaking clay pieces, failed materials, starting over, etc.). But she finally finished it this week, and the result is quite striking. It now graces (and guards) the garden gate behind our Coho home.

The head, feet, and fins are ceramic. The hair on head and tail-tip is copper wire. The scales are pennies — about $40 worth, individually polished and coated with weatherproofing. The body is constructed of flexible, ribbed plastic tubing of different diameters, and is coated with a hard-to-get plasterlike substance normally used by taxidermists and museum-diorama artists. I’m sure I’ve omitted some of the other miscellaneous materials.

She named the dragon Yu Wei, which a couple of our Taiwanese friends say means “Jade the Great or Powerful” in Chinese but could also mean other things. Since it’s a female dragon, there are no precedents, since Chinese dragons are traditionally male. (Click on individual photos to enlarge.)