I’m in Billund this week, representing The Brothers Brick at Fan Media Days, where we’re lucky to get an inside look at what projects LEGO is cooking up for the months to come. As cool as those sneak peeks are, a highlight of this experience has been the chance to see the MOCs on display in the LEGO employee campus, especially The Great Turtle Race by Ghaniaian/Canadian artist Ekow Nimakow. I’ve admired pictures of  Nimakow’s work online, with the unmistakable use of black bricks to create large-scale models embodying the spirit of Afrofuturism. Still, pictures didn’t prepare me for seeing the artist’s work in person.

The sculptures are massive, but that alone isn’t noteworthy in Billund where you’re surrounded by large-scale brick installations designed to inspire and delight. It’s the non-system elements, like the Technic plates used for the turtle shells, used at such a large scale that seamless curves emerge. Thousands of feather elements in the fins are layered to create a texture between animal scale and brush stroke. The feeling of motion in the children’s locks stirs the spirit.

About the piece, Nimakow says:

“When constructing beings, creatures, or other living structures out of LEGO bricks, artistic play becomes a biological process for me where creation seems to occur on the molecular level. Tiny plastic pieces act as cellular building blocks for what are to become complex entities that venture to breathe life into their environment.”

Nimakow was commissioned by LEGO to create the piece in 2022. While it has been in the Billund offices since then, it recently moved to a new location where it can be viewed by more visitors to the campus, but is unfortunately not displayed for the general public. If you’re near Ontario, the the artist just opened a new exhibition this week of his Building Black Civilizations exhibition at the Robert Mclaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.

If a trip to Ontario isn’t in the cards, you can watch the artist at work in this charming interview from Wired: