What could you do with 54,250 tennis balls if you weren’t playing tennis?
The answer is obvious really; put a full size adult hippopotamus inside a pyramid that is 2.5m high and 3.6m wide at the base and make it appear to float in a lake of water hyacinths.
The ‘hippopotennis’ is essentially a mathematical sculpture, hippo-pot-o-math if you will.
The hippo represents the mass of 54,250 balls (3.1 tons) and the pyramid represents the volume that 54,250 tennis balls take up. The water hyacinths are there because they are both loved by hippos and can be created using a tennis ball as the heart.
The sculpture has been created by designer/maker, Maggie Ruddy with the help of a class of young artists from Wimbledon High School and was on display at Wimbledon from June until December 2013.
'Hippopotennis' participants
Isabella Atwell
Alice Ashworth
Georgina Burnett
Jessica Bryden
Marina Chen
Amy Culham
Saskia Edwards
Sascha Entwistle
Ksenia Grigorieva
Alice Griffin
Eleanor Gruffin
Sophie Kelly
Daisy Lavelle
Katie Macdougall
Maryam Namivar
Saavi Patel
Edie Petit
Verity Quant
Maya Quinn
Aisha Rafique
Isabella Ralph
Vishaali Ramesh
Millie Ranyard
Eilidh Read
Georgia Rennie
Lucy Simpson
Rosa Skeete
Isabel Staples
Manuela Villa Topple
Jenny H Wetterwald
Isabel WIlliamson
Melody Wilson
