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.