Its been two months and I am finally back from the shop with a new creation to share.
My second largish piece of the year, it measures 15.5"x 30" x 11" and weighs roughly 65 pounds.
As I often mention in my posts, I try to incorporate both engineering and creative concepts into each of my designs. It is really important to me that my works are in some small way grounded in something more concrete like an engineering challenge. I enjoy the constraints it imparts and it also gives me something tangible to talk about with the work. I find the aesthetic decisions I make for any given work are nearly impossible to articulate in a way that makes sense to other people, so its nice to have a side to the work that is less tricky to share.
The catalyst for this piece came from the interlocking spoke assemblage you see below.
This assembly was conceived of while working on another project. At the time it did not fit with what I was doing, so I saved that idea, and used it as the technical foundation for designing this work. It took many tries to get this arrangement to both function properly and look interesting to me. But once I had resolved this element, the rest of the piece slowly took shape around it.
Material wise, I've been really into using bronze lately, it machines well and is somewhat scratch resistant. I love its color and how it eventually turns a nice warm brown with a little age. It also goes really well with the aluminum and so the bulk of this sculpture is constructed out of either aluminum or bronze, with just a few small details made out of Stainless steel. The orange details in this work are anodized aluminum as well.
Unable to find bronze tubing in the proper size, I was forced to make the large pieces in the legs out of solid bar stock, which contributes a great deal to the weight of this piece.
The drawing this time around is a bit of an evolution over previous ones, as I have started to abandon the contained rectangular format. when laying this one out, I realized how unnecessary a rigid border was when trying to create something visually interesting, and so I intentionally broke through it in a few places with unexpectedly positive results.
Now that this drawing has set a precedent, I have a lot of new ideas on where future drawings may be able to take this farther.
There are a lot more angles and images below, as well as process shots. So please enjoy.
The actual finished blue line print.
As always, comments welcome.