Waterbugs flooded the sidewalks in 2010, crickets invaded buildings in the spring and now Nicholls is introduced to some new types of creatures thanks to a library specialist in the government documents section of Ellender Memorial Library.

William Charron is an artist who creates sculptures of bugs and animals both real and created from his mind. He graduated from Nicholls in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in art and a concentration in sculpture.

Charron said he has always had an interest in animals and bugs. His first piece at Nicholls was a three-foot shark made of paper and posters.

“Nearly everything that I have made sculptural-wise has been either a real bug or something I’ve created in my own mind,” Charron said as he showed a small collection of several mosquitoes, a spider and a slug on his desk. Each animal stood an average of six inches tall, but Charron has made sculptures that were much larger while he was in school.

“When I started with paper, the biggest sculpture I did was about three feet,” he said. “From there it was like, ‘Let’s see how far I can push it,’ and it was a full sized animal with arms and legs that we had to hang from the ceiling.”

Charron said he has done hundreds of pieces in his life, and for about six years, he did about 10 to 15 per year.

Since he graduated, Charron has become more involved with making computer-based art, although he has used many different types of media.

“I have a friend who actually started a studio after she graduated, and so she does ceramics where I’ll work with clay,” he said. “Another one I’m experimenting with is called sculpey, which is a putty that you can actually bake in your own oven to finish a sculpture.”

Of all of the pieces Charron has made, each one has a sort of linear aspect to it.

“If you look at just about everything I’ve made, they all have some sort of a long appendage or a leg,” Charron said as he points out one of the six inch tall mosquito sculptures on his desk. “My favorite thing about these mosquitoes is not just that they are mosquitoes; It’s the line work of how their bodies flow.”

If there is one thing that residents of South Louisiana know, it’s mosquitoes. Charron said that one of the reasons he chose to make them was because of how we think of them here.

“One of the fun things about making them so big was because the idea of, ‘What if they actually were that big?'” he laughed. “Sometimes it may seem like we think that they are. That’s part of the fun in playing with the scale of these things because it’s not always just the design of the animal; it’s the scale of it that gives you that reaction from the viewer.”

Speaking of viewer reactions, Charron said he has had many different ones over the years.

“A few of my biggest works had strange reactions,” he said. “Some see it as kind of gross looking, but if it is another artist, it might be that they are just amazed that I pulled it off with the materials that I used.”

Although he now works in the library, Charron said that his art surprisingly ties in with his job.

“I thought I’d just be here looking at books all day and do art when I got home, but I did not realize that with all of the display cases here, they needed someone with a creative eye,” he said. “Sometimes people will come up with their own display and tell me they need a sign, so I’ll ask them what the subject is, and they will let me do what I want.”

Charron’s latest display was a collection of cookie cutters.

“The woman who did it said she would have loved to have Cookie Monster, so we had a big image of Cookie Monster and had a banner that simply said cookies,” he said. “I made the word cookies look like it was made out of cookie cutters.”

Charron said the biggest thing that he has done while working here was making a book with his former boss.

“She had the idea of making a wetlands webliography which is just basically a list of all online materials for wetlands,” he said. “She said that she would do the text, and I did all of the graphics.”

The entire front cover of the book was made with computer images and photos that Charron made himself. The background of the cover is a photo that he took of the trees near the Nicholls fountain on highway 1.

“It was actually put out as a state document, so I had to put it in my own collection,” Charron said. “Something that I created was now part of the collection.”

Charron said that his art is sometimes put on display in the library. He said that his favorite thing about his art is the reaction that he receives when someone sees an animal that he made up.

“I like showing people and hearing them say, ‘You made that up?'” he said. “It’s the idea of seeing these creatures and being able to physically manifest them in a way.”