There’s nothing like driving down an old dirt road and smelling a field full of fresh-cut hay bales. What’s even cooler though is when the hay bales have been turned into towering colossal sculptures that look like animals.
Farmers and festival artists in Japan have organized one of the coolest events that people can attend and it’s called Wara Art Festival. It happens every year around the region’s annual rice harvest.
Visitors come from miles away and sometimes even from other countries to see the enormous sculptures of the different animals and mythological creatures, some standing up to 30 feet high.
They’ve built sculptures of animals like cats, dogs, bulls, ducks, rams, eagles bears, and much much more. The artists are very good and stack the straw in a way that gives each sculpture incredible details that bring it to life.
In 2006, farmers in the region had an excess of hay and it prompted a partnership between Iwamuro Village and Tokyo’s Musashino Art University to take the excess hay and use it to create art.
The creation of the art sparked the first Wara Art Festival which happened in 2008 and it continues to this day. Students come to the fields of hay and designed the most beautiful oversized hay sculptures.
They start by building wooden structures first and then they carefully place straws of hay in strategic ways to get it to form what they are trying to create.
Wara Art keeps photos of all the different sculptures they’ve created in the gallery on their website, as well as their Facebook page. The sculptures for this year will be on display from now until October 31st.