Ten winters. That's how long Wayne Porter spent on his steel horse. Now he's done. Sort of.
The forty foot, sixty-or-so ton (that's an estimate) horse is fully realized, but still has to make the one hundred forty mile trek from St. Lawrence, South Dakota to the Porter Sculpture Park near Montrose.
A Porter project is born of obsession. "I have to get them out of my head." Now he has to get it down the highway.
"We're going to try to figure out if it can be moved," says Porter. "It's massive. I think it can be. And then we're going to have a Kickstarter project, or sell kidneys. I think it's a two kidney project though."
"Then I've got to make stainless steel implants for concrete, knock a hillside down [to build a platform at the sculpture park], then get a crew in here and a massive crane. Can't have the normal cranes you use."
As epic (and terrifying from a Trojan perspective) as it would be to watch a giant horse, standing atop a flatbed, slow-rolling down the road, unfortunately that situation would have some clearance issues, so Porter plans to remove the legs before attempting the move. That's the plan anyway.
"Nothing goes the way you want it to go. You don't know what's going to go wrong. You do know something is going to go wrong. Since nobody has loaded a horse like this, nobody knows what to do."
This spring he'll get to work on the concrete and steel foundation/pedestal for the horse, but he's not sure if the horse makes it to Montrose this summer or not.
"Who knows? Big horses have their own minds."
Meanwhile, he's making a giant rabbit — repurposing an old cement truck mixer drum for the body, and building the head out of steel tubing and railroad tie plates leftover from the horse.
"Apparently I like to do big things. I swore to God I'd never do anything big again. But no. The rabbit won. The rabbit wanted to be born, so I guess the rabbit is going to be born."
