The Super Lamb Banana

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The Super Lamb Banana is a sculpture in Liverpool, England.

It is painted in bright yellow, weighs almost eight tons and stands at about 15 foot. It is often mistaken for a dog, but as its name suggests, it was intended to be a cross between a banana and a lamb. It was created by Manhattan-based Japanese artist Taro Chiezo for the ArtTransPennine Exhibition in 1998, in celebration of the reopening of Liverpool's branch of the famous Tate Gallery. It originally stood outside the Liverpool Playhouse in Williamson Square, where it was regularly vandalised. It now stands in Tithebarn Street, outside the Liverpool John Moores University Avril Robarts Library/LRC (Learning Resource Centre) Building, after spending some time in Wapping, near the Albert Dock on the city's famous waterfront

The artist sculpted it as an ironic comment on the dangers of genetic engineering, as well as to reflect the city's playful sense of humour. Chiezo himself made only a four-inch model, and it was up to local Andy Small to recreate it on a scale of 1:50, using a wire-mesh frame supporting a concrete shell.

Although its usual colour is yellow, the statue has occasionally been given a temporary repaint as part of a sponsorship arrangement. Colours have included pink, during a period of sponsorship by the breast cancer awareness charity Breakthrough^[1], the colours of a Friesian cow during a period of 'quasi-vandalism'^[2], and purple during the SmokeFree Liverpool campaign^[3].

Nor has it remained static: the statue spent time at Spike Island in nearby Widnes, Cheshire, near the Catalyst Museum, and was once spotted on the back of a truck in the Merseyside town of Prescot^{[citation needed]}.