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Hoarding My Frog Food is a 1972 ceramic sculpture by David Gilhooly. It stands nearly three-and-a-half feet tall and reaches just over two feet wide. The piece is whimsical, and Gilhooly manages to bring word play to life through the artwork. For instance, an animal called a moose stands in for chocolate mousse. And it would be understandable to wonder whether the sculpture’s title refers to food for frogs or food made of frogs. This description will start with the sculpture’s base, then move up to finish up with the moose on top.

The base is shaped like a slightly warped and puckered upside-down soup bowl with ridges wrapping around it. Very shiny, splotchy yellows and greens all over the base are reminiscent of tangled threads of algae decorating the surface of a pond. Teetering on top of the base is a slightly tipped back, and very full, round boat about twice the size of the base. The boat is made of ceramic crafted to look like wooden planks. At the juncture of the boat and the base is where Gilhooly’s humor starts to really become clear. Piled all around the bottom of the boat are little milk-chocolate-brown beavers. Many face out, perhaps standing guard, while the others face the boat. In fact, half of the boat is surrounded by thick, rough wood as if the beavers are right then chewing away at a tree trunk to reveal within it that the boat’s planks are already cut, sanded, stained, bent, and nailed together beneath the bark.

A blue-green fish head sticks out of the front upper rim of the boat, and at the back, the fish’s tail protrudes. Just inside the boat from where the fish tail pokes out, a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, burly man with dark red hair and thick eyebrows leans back. His head is tilted back, his lips pursed. Because he sits even with the fish tail, he almost looks like a merman. But his body is inside, only it is obscured by a tower of sandwiches, and his arms are open wide to embrace this sandwich tower.

Though all made of ceramic, a number of the sandwiches are sculpted to be on white bread with the crusts still on, others on brioche rolls, or buns. All equally delicious looking, they are built with painstaking detail in the spongy surface of the sliced bread and the scoring and gradient of pale to medium brown of the rolls’ crusts. The sandwiches are comically large, each nearly the size of the man’s face. The tower of them reaches almost twice as high as his arms ever could. Many hold a bright green, frilly lettuce leaf. Most delightfully, they each also contain one glimmering light green frog. Some frogs lie on their backs with stripes of mustard and ketchup down their bellies. Others are hunkering down over their own thick piece of cheese. The sandwiches are interspersed with a few loaded baked potatoes that have green peas on top sticking up like bulging, round frog eyes.

Standing triumphantly on top of this decadent vertical buffet is a glistening brown moose with wide, pronged horns. His mouth gapes open, and he faces the man and the fish tail. Although quite muscular in build, the moose is tiny compared to the man, only about five sandwiches long from snout to tail. This shimmering little adult moose must in fact be sculpted chocolate mousse. And if he is, then today, dessert should be eaten first, lest he tumble off if someone try to remove a sandwich or a baked potato first.