Do you cringe at the thought of a creepy crawly entering your personal space? Have you embarrassed yourself by screaming at the sight of the isty-est bitsy-est spider? Well, the Big Bugs exhibit at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle features a daddy long legs that is seventeen feet in diameter and weighs four hundred and fifty pounds.
Ken Dybas is a highway construction worker and he says that he’s seen some pretty strange things. Like discarded furniture, people and animals wandering along the freeway. Giant ants made of sticks.

DYBAS: We were out here working yesterday when they were installing them and I had to keep my crew going because they actually wanted to keep stopping to watch the operation of these going up. It was really something else. 

Ken’s referring to three, 20 foot long ants that weigh 700 pounds each. Not to worry. Their size is not due anything Ken dug up along the highway. They are the work of New York artist David Rogers. He says that kids learn how to identify insects but they don’t necessarily understand them.

ROGERS: Stay away from that ant hill, Billy. That’s crazy business cause you know they play such a more integral role in the ecosystem that we could imagine.

David and I are standing in an area of the Arboretum that’s not open to the public. It’s the research and cultivation area. Large earth movers roar in the back round. The air is saturated with the fragrance of budding trees and seedlings soon to be planted through out the grounds. David opens the door to a large shipping container the bugs call home when not on display. It smells like varnish. The daddy’s eight long legs hang over a metal pole to dry. Just outside is a pile of ant parts waiting to be assembled. According to the Arboretum’s Gina Tesdesco, one of them is smiling.

TEDESCO: They do have an inviting quality. They’re not scary, they’re not ugly, they’re just, ‘Hi, you want to play with me?’

ROGERS: Part of the design in the early years was to try to make them as friendly as I could. 

Some have personalities that suggest that it’s not so easy being huge.

ROGERS: One’s definitely grumpy if you look close but I’m not gonna tell you which one.

David’s sculptures are made entirely of renewable resources. The bodies are made of standing dead trees, held together with willow branches he cuts close to the ground to insure re-growth. He say’s that sometimes he knows exactly what he wants to make. Other times, it’s the trees tell him what they want to be.

ROGERS: I had a bunch of dead red cedar trees leaning up against my studio when I started the big bugs and had this whole other ideal for designing how I was going to go about making the dragonfly bodies and I walked by the trees so many times I got used to seeing them. I stopped seeing them for what they were. I said they are already dragonfly bodies.

David hands me what I think is amber. It’s the size of the palm of my hand. But before I can plot my escape with the gorgeous stone, he bursts my bubble and tells me its cedar. They are the eyes for his 1,200 pound praying mantis. He points to the stack of ant parts waiting for assembly. Their eyes are not brilliant red like the mantis. The sun has turned them into a softer hue with yellow undertones. The ant parts are interchangeable and built around a metal substructure.

ROGERS: These are the only ants you could say they have an endo and exo skeleton. Meaning we as humans we have our skeletons inside of our bodies so that’s an endo. But all insects, that hard shell that is their skeleton. They’re all gooey inside.

David began his career in 1990 by building a 15-foot dinosaur out of fallen tree branches. His first big bug was commissioned by a botanical garden in Dallas, Texas, in 1999. He says that his body of work all about continuing the life cycle.

ROGERS: Every wood worker could probably share that experience with you and say that they get to give the tree a new life.

And like all living things…

ROGERS: They go back to all their original compounds; simple compounds. I mean they just turn to dust. They go back to the soil.