Bright spark spends two years building giant 90kg globe made from matches

Artist Andy Yoder’s creation has lit up the art world - after he made a giant globe from 300,000 matchsticks.

Andy, 56, spent two years building the incredible creation, which weighs a whopping 90kg and is 43 inches in diameter.

The New York based artist used satellite images of the Earth during Hurricane Sandy as a basis for the sculpture as well as a second hand desktop globe to help map the contours of each country.

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Amazingly, each matchstick is hand painted to achieve the most accurate colour pigment and took a gruelling four days of work per week to complete.

Reluctant to see all of his hard work go up in flames, Andy took the decision to dip each match in a fire retardant.

Andy said: ‘The idea to build a globe made from matchsticks came to me as an subconscious idea, probably when I was half asleep or in a dream like state.
 
'I bought a desktop globe at a second hand store to help map the globe and used the latitude and longitude lines as a grid that I could transfer to my larger model.

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'Each square of the grid was numbered, so I could copy the contours of the continents square by square.
 
'When people see my work, they become wide eyed with gaping mouths and instantly they want to touch it.
 
'Luckily, my globe isn't flammable, I painted the tips by dipping 5 matchsticks at a time in a mixture of paint, water and flame retardant.
 
'Although I have tried many large scale art installations in the past, this is by far the most work intensive and time consuming project I have ever done.'