Zombie Mew
Genesis
Mew was one of those characters that stayed with me since childhood, purely out of fascination. In the early Pokémon games, Mew wasn’t accessible through normal gameplay. It existed inside the cartridge data, yet there was no legitimate way to obtain it unless you attended special Nintendo events.
Before the internet was widespread, that created a kind of global mythology: rumours and theories that travelled everywhere, all centered around how to catch a character that was technically present but intentionally hidden. That mix of mystery, design and narrative absence always captured my attention.
Years later, I came across a large-scale Mew figure. The size, the recognizable form and the personal meaning it carried made me want to take it into my own sculptural style.
Process
At that time I was still exploring my zombie reinterpretations of iconic characters, so I decided to approach Mew from that angle. Working at this scale required a different technical view, mainly because I couldn’t bake big pieces in the oven, so I rebuilt the internal exposed areas using epoxy clay instead of polymer clay.
What had previously been small incisions and details became much more complex due to the size of the piece. It forced me to rethink how to distribute weight, how to integrate the sculpted textures and how to keep the intervention clean despite the scale.
In the painting stage I pushed it fully into that undead palette I was working with at the time. The result leaned slightly more alien than zombie, but it aligned with the sense of strangeness that originally made Mew interesting to me.
Outcome
This was a personal project, made simply for the pleasure of reinterpreting a character that shaped part of my visual memory growing up. It was technically challenging, but also rewarding in a more personal way. Just the enjoyment of taking an icon from my childhood and twisting it into my own language.
