Jeremy Link stood in the reptile house at the Toledo Zoo, wearing work boots and holding a tape measure. A man approached him and asked, “Excuse me, do you work here?” Link replied, “No . . . but I made that,” and he pointed to a towering, 17-foot tall, 600-pound fiberglass sculpture of a Quetzalcoatlus pterosaur, a flying reptile that lived during the Triassic period.
The man looked up the long neck stretched towards the pink and gray, bird-like head, with a yellow feather mohawk that reached towards the building’s sky-lighted ceiling. “You made that?!” the man asked in disbelief, as his eyes followed each reptilian rivet of the pterosaur’s legs towards its arched wing enclosure. In fact, after almost 900 hours of research, sculpting, painting, and planning with his business partner, Doug Kampfer, he had made it.
Building everything
The Quetzalcoatlus is just one of the many larger-than-everyday-life projects created by Link and Kampfer with their 3-year-old business, Graphite Design + Build. They have built dream-like playgrounds for the Toledo Metroparks, with sculptures of friendly turtles, frogs, and slides that push kids out of cartoon-shaped trees.
They designed and painted an epic mural spanning an entire wall of the Black Cloister Brewery, depicting the four horsemen of the apocalypse delivering beer from the heavens. For the Toledo Zoo, they made a 17-foot-long saltwater crocodile, a family of penguins, and natural-looking water basins for living birds. And in the Toledo Zoo’s newly remodeled aquarium, every visitor will stare directly into the mouth of a life-size great white shark that they built and suspended from the ceiling.
A business began
Link and Kampfer are both Ohio natives—Link grew up outside Cleveland, while Kampfer spent his early years in Waterville. They both enrolled in Bowling Green State University to study art. Link wanted to digitally design movies, and Kampfer wanted to spend his life drawing dinosaurs. They met after college, when they worked together for 10 years at a company they now refer to only as “Voldemort.” It was a job that flew them all over the world, they installed an adventure park in Malaysia, worked construction in England and Eilat, Israel. “At one point we worked together, and then we were friends. But now we are just brothers,” Kampfer said. The job gave them incomparable experience, but no creative freedom. So on January 1, 2012, they opened Graphite Design + Build.
Kampfer and Link will tell you that they have no business plan, no vision. “I’ve never had a five-year plan,” said Kampfer. When you ask them what they do for a living, they say simply that they “make sculptures” or “really pretty industrial design.” Without a concrete business model, their incredible talent—their ability to make “anything except a motor,” according to Kampfer—has kept them constantly busy.
Inside the studio
Link and Kampfer’s downtown studio at 15 North Huron St. looks like a mix between Dad’s workshop, an art studio and the lab of an evil scientist.
“Our biggest strength is knowledge of materials,” Link said. I watched them coat the head of a mechanical shark with glue, preparing a lifelike silicone skin to be attached, another project for the Zoo’s aquarium. Half the head will be as real as in the wild, with a pointed snout and sharp teeth and big, black eyes. The other half will expose the shark’s skeleton, complete with spine and skull. The jaw will move with a twist of a lever.
I drove past their studio one night after 9pm, as they put the finishing touches on their mechanical shark. It was due to be installed the next day. Two walkers stopped, stood on their tip-toes, and peered through the still-lit window; frozen by what was unbelievably being built inside.
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Dorian Slaybod is an attorney happily living in Toledo.
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