Twists and turns to create Dickson's new snake sculpture

Timber is typically straight and snakes famously not, so you can see the challenge that confronted Hiroshi Yamaguchi.

The Japanese founder of the Fyshwick-based custom furniture studio Koitoya Design was awarded a contract by the City Renewal Authority (CRA) late last year to create a sculpture to ring in 2025 – the ‘year of the snake’ according to Chinese lore.

The snake-themed artwork would then be installed along Woolley Street, Dickson, in time for the Lunar New Year street party on Saturday, 1 February, and remain there for the entire year.

Hiroshi was no stranger to it. He’d also won the contract in 2024 – the year of the dragon – and created a three-metre-tall dragon sculpture for display on the same plinth in Woolley Street.

But a snake? That would require extra creativity. Like gathering dead trees from Captain’s Flat and branches from a garden in Downer.

“The design was quite free – we just had to come up with one based on Chinese culture – so I did quite a bit of research,” he says.

He settled on three components he wanted – a round ‘moon gate’ in the middle, surrounded by slats of wood inspired by Chinese cutting paper, and wrapped around it all, a red-painted, three-metre-long snake decorated with flower stencils.

“A moon gate is quite a typical feature in a Chinese garden, and the snake is crawling around it to make a round shape,” Hiroshi explains.

“And the frame is inspired by Chinese cutting papers, which has almost 2000 years of history in China, pretty much since paper was invented, where they typically use red paper and cut symbols into it.”

To help pull it off, the CRA’s project manager gave Hiroshi access to the ACT’s logging yard, where all the city’s dead or fallen street trees go to be chipped into mulch.

“I went and collected two quite big logs, oak and ash, because they’re very good for steam-bending,” he says.

Steam-bending is the art – or rather, science – of heating the wood to near 100 degrees Celsius inside an insulated pipe, and “while it’s hot, we clamp it and form it into the curve we want”.

These trees became the moon gate. For the square frame, Hiroshi needed “something quite solid and big”. For this, he rang a fellow wood artist who happened to have a big Arizona cypress log in his yard that had been felled several years earlier in Captain’s Flat.

The snake itself took months of gathering various shaped branches from yards across Canberra.

“The snake has a very round shape, so we were searching and searching for curved branches and it was really quite hard,” Hiroshi says.

“In the end, we reached out to a couple of arborists and one in particular was very helpful and whenever he saw something come up that might work, he’d let me know. This garden in Downer was one of them.”

Once all the pieces were gathered, work to create it started in early December and ran for nearly two months into January.

“We have three permanent staff members and one casual staff member, so we were pretty busy.”

The finished product was unveiled at the Lunar New Year festival on 1 February, alongside 12 hours of dragon and K-Pop dances, Zodiac performances, Kung Fu demonstrations, balloon and calligraphy workshops, and much more.

The best part for Hiroshi, was seeing the reactions.

“The snake looks quite scary, but we were trying to give it an air of friendliness too to match the atmosphere of the festival,” he says.

“We wanted people to want to line up and take selfies with it, and that’s exactly what happened. I’m pretty happy with how it looks.”