Month: October 2009

So my oxygen ran out and I’ve been writing letters to my good man Pierre to fill up the well and by lunchtime today I’ll be able to go out and pay my gas bill and get some more bottles. Meanwhile I’ve gone ahead on a table thats been without a top for a while. I found a lovely bit of concrete last weekend, in a bin of course, that is an edge thats been cut off with a diamond saw. I’m going to use it down the centre of the table with wood on each side. I’ll line the sides of the cut, as it were, with galv sheet with little brass nails and hold the two sides and the concrete together with 6mm rod drilled into the wood and passing through the concrete. Should be quite nice.

And when I got bored with the table and all that sanding, rasping and grinding with the arbortech, I started in on the Ottoman for Aesthete.

I’m really starting to tend towards a methodology with ply that owes more to boat builing and early aeroplane construction in that I use very light materials and strengthen them with ribs and gussets. This is from a artwork I made last year of a submarine where I used packing crate ply and no more nails exclusively to see whether I could build a strong structure that was also light… and it worked.

This is the finished base, well unpainted anyways, and though it might be a little heavier than a single thickness of 25mm plywood, which would normally be used for something like this, its at least two times stronger than a single sheet would be so it’s going to allow the steel work holding it up to be less structural simply because the base is rigid enough in bending that it won’t need the supporting structure to do more than suspend it at a given height.

It’s almost as if the aspects that make my stuff arty can only happen because I have an instinctual understanding of how I can get the most from specific materials and have that somewhat hidden by the art that it seems to convey. If anything I like to play with peoples ideas of structure and substance by keeping them to a minimum. I’ve often been accused of creating things that look flimsy and unsubstantial then I can shock them, the accuser, by bouncing up and down on the piece and shattering, well thats a bit strong, um..suspending their judgement and their ideas of what structure is and how it actually works.

Underneath the Art I’m actually more of an engineer I suppose because art is really quite boring but taking materials and pushing them to the edges of usefulness… thats interesting! The fact that in the process it tends to become Art, well thats just a side effect.

I have been enjoying this. No doubt about it, I’m a metal fabricator!

It’s really quite hard work; I may have already mentioned that and given it’s mostly relevant to the events that I partake in, namely making metal stuff, then I will no doubt mention it again, but it’s very satisfying and dangerous as well. Very hot metal, lots of sharp things to impale ones self upon and precarious positioning of both myself and the object worked on adds up to a level of blaise risk that really is quite dear to my heart.

And just look at the colours in the concrete floor! Aren’t they beautiful?
I’m well on my way here and may even have approached the half way mark.

This is the kind of detail that will end up all over the place. It’s at the top right corner.

And this is where the actual posterior meets the raw stuff of the earths centre… well, that’s supposedly nickel iron and this is iron with a dash of carbon, and the bronze which is a mix of copper and tin, mostly copper. Anyways, I’m thinking I might do some form of upholstered cushion for this as I have a bunch of sheepskin, both with fleece still attached and plain hides, that plays with the underlying structure. I really do like the idea of hiding one type of detailing underneath another even to the extent of having the finer sitting under the coarser. I suppose that, pyschologically, I’m speaking of my often coarse outward appearance and alluding to the fine details of my thought processes that lurk underneath. Whatever eh!

It’ really has been rather a long time since I’ve done any pure straightforward art… well, other than a bunch of masonary stuff I did a week or two ago; and must get back into actually because I came accross a very nice bin on the ol’ mangere bus route round the back of Ellerslie, all those old well kept mansiony villa’s, full of all sorts of expensive broken masonary. What stopped me was a huge chunk of scoria jutting from the top of it but once that had been carried to the car, easily 40kg’s of it, I realised the rest of the bin was full of treasures too, so I put the car on it’s rubber for the ride home… anyways, this’ll be the patio out the front of the house, Mum gets the good stuff!
Meanwhile I’ve sold two pieces in a gallery in Parnell, Aesthete run by Pierre and Genevieve, a chair and a stool, which were both surplus stock, the chair only a few years old but the stole went back to the early nineties, and I’ve been encouraged, by the smell of dollero’s, to do some more stuff. So I am and I’m quite surprised I can still do it and especially how it’s getting harder physically but much easier creatively. I did this yesterday after getting home at about 2am and basically went until it was too dark to see what I was doing.

As always it’s really hard to get a good impression of how I fill 3 dimensional space with a 2 dimensional photo but what can you do. Model it in softaware to rotate and zoom? That’d take as long as it does to just make the dam thing… if not longer!


Now if you know welding and metalwork you’ll see how much work I’ve got ahead of me. This is the easy bit, just bending , cutting and tacking up. Now I’ve got to go through and weld all the joins up and then work up the subsidary framework to strengthen it all up so if a fat bastard decides to sit in it… it’ll groan and squeak somewhat but it won’t take a dive to mother earth.
I’ve kinda figured it all out, where the solid sheet goes and where the sheet with holes in it goes and even where the cushion is and what shape it’ll be… as well as where the decorative bits will go. I’d say another two days of welding, cutting and grinding etc, then maybe two days cleaning it up and getting the protective coat on. I’ll post my progress as I go. About 5 hrs work so far.