Twist — Balloon-Animal Cartoon Horse, Toy Museum, Nuremberg

Every child who has ever been to a party has seen a balloon horse. Almost none of them survive the week. The toy museum’s proposal was to make one that would last fifty years, and to be honest about what it is.

The brief

A horse built the way a balloon twister builds one: cylinders, pinch points, knots. About 2 m. It had to be glossy and taut like an inflated balloon, and it had to be obviously a cartoon, because a realistic horse made of balloons would be horrifying.

Learning the vocabulary

We spent a day with a professional balloon twister and photographed the construction of eleven horses. Balloon horses are not modelled, they are folded, and the whole charm lies in the fact that the form is locked into a fixed number of sealed segments.

So the sculpture is built as segments. The neck is one twisted cylinder, the body another, each leg one each, the tail one more, and the head is a single rounded segment with two small pinches for the ears. Nothing is anatomically modelled. If a real balloon horse would have to bend there, our horse bends there.

Making fibreglass look airtight

The character of an inflated object is that its surface is under tension, and that shows as a very even, very tense gloss with slightly softened edges. We achieved it by keeping the wall thickness even, radius every twist point to a precise 18 mm, and building up the clear coat so that it reads as a skin rather than a finish.

The knotted ends at the tail and the ear pinches are actual knots, modelled from photographs of real ones, with the creases and the small tail of loose balloon reproduced exactly.

In the courtyard

It stands beside the museum’s bench, at a height where a child can walk under the neck. There is no barrier and the museum has no plans to add one. The paint has been wiped clean twice a week since it was installed, and the surface is holding up better than anything else in the collection that spends its life outdoors.