Chesterfield College Art and Design students have built a Trojan horse that stands 13ft tall in the Art and Design studios.

As a 160ft tall figure of a white horse was this month chosen as a £2m art commission for South East England, Chesterfield College students were putting the finishing touches to their own equine-inspired masterpiece.


German Exchange AS level student- Friederike Shroder is pictured with the sculpture

Made from cardboard sheets supplied by a local paper mill, the armoured horse, which in legend was used by the Greeks to gain entrance to Troy, was built by students on the A-Level and entry to art and design programmes.

Whilst the Ebbsfleet horse, designed by Turner Prize-winner Mark Wallinger, will cost £2m, the Chesterfield College Sculpture cost less than £20 to create.

The students’ creation is also built from recycled cardboard as oppose to non renewable concrete and fibreglass.

The cardboard Trojan horse took six weeks to complete and currently bestrides one of the Art and Design studios at the Infirmary Road Campus. Sadly it is too big to remain in its current location and will not stand as long as the Ebbsfleet horse, which will be built to last for seventy years.

From Ancient Troy and Renaissance Italy to Chesterfield College

The origin of the College project also owes a debt to an account of the Greek legend where the invading army built the Trojan horse from their boats.

Art and Design lecturers Steve Penney and Judy Hawdon came up with the idea for the sculpture. Steve said:

“When the twenty students embarked on the project they were unaware what it was they were building. The group were led to think that it was a one-day task for students to work in pairs making boats from strips of card.

“At the end of the session I marked out an eight foot square on the floor with positions for each hoof and revealed that the task was going to be a lot, lot bigger.”

The concept has ties with a second historical event as, without any reliable source as to how the Trojan horse looked, the students drew on Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth century designs for an equestrian statue, commissioned by the Duke of Milan.

Steve added: “Da Vinci’s horse of 1493 was only ever built as a model; the bronze that was set aside for its casting was used instead for cannons to defend the city of Milan from invasion by Charles VIII.
“The students liked the idea of fulfilling the renaissance artist’s dream in the twenty first century, so we took inspiration for the cardboard horse from just a few of his surviving anatomical drawings.
“We are extremely pleased with the sculpture. The two groups of students worked very hard in partnership on every aspect of designing, engineering and building it, and I’m very proud of everyone who took part.”