Hundreds of lines

I started the day wrapping bailer twine around this ring to try and mark out the pattern. After much winding and unwinding of miles of string I gave up on the string and started to draw the lines freehand. This is very tricky and took me all day. Lots of scrubbing out of lines as they failed to meet the ones coming from the other side. Most frustrating but the pattern is on the marble and I have begun to etch out the lines with the disc. I am itching to see how the pattern will look.

Ring in the dark

I have started a ring along the same lines as an earlier version but with the discs getting smaller and slighter as they rise. The evenings are drawing in and the photo taken at dusk is slightly dull as a result. I have been to London to visit my gallery which has joined forces with a gallery from South Africa called Everard Read. They are calling the new enterprise Circa. I hope this will be a happy union and generally feel very optimistic about it as Everard Read have been around for over a hundred years and have a great reputation and global reach. The date for my exhibition with them is now set for the beginning of April 2016.

Fresh start

I have put aside the complicated swirling ring and have begun something fresh. This time a ring that is not round like a ball but perhaps round like a pebble. This sculpture will be simple but hard to get right. After the complexities of the last sculpture it will be good to get immersed in something like this. I am not quite sure where I go from this beginning and am hoping that the new day will bring clarity.

Getting there

I have been away in Italy looking at robots and more importantly the people that operate them. This is for a possible commission…. Now home again I am determined to get this sculpture looking right. I remember when doing my 100 DAY series where each carving needed to be completed in a single day that there were some carvings that struck me as awful half way through the day. What was interesting was how often it was possible to rescue the situation. I think had I not decided to exhibit all 100 carvings I might well have given up on some. Although I have felt wobbly about this carving I am pushing through to the end and am beginning to feel that it may be worthwhile after all. The carving is very difficult to get looking neat as there are places inside that are very hard to reach.

Twist again

This is painstaking work. Dozens of spirals all needing lots of careful work. Unless the forms become really animated then they will certainly just look a mess. They may still look a mess of course but I am reckoning they might add up to something interesting. We shall see. Warm and dry days in September are a real treat.

Donut and starry skies

This is picking up on the idea of wrapping the swirling pattern around a sphere. Here I am trying to wrap it around a donut form instead. The high and low points are being cut out with this drill. This is just as I did with the sphere and it seemed to work quite well. This is one of those ideas that is a little hard to visualise before the sculpture is made. I don’t know if it will work. I do like applying a set of ‘rules’ however and then letting it play out. The piece of plywood that the blue drill bit goes through is to help get the bit started in the right place. Each new hole required moving the plywood. Quite a task.

Plywood mock up

I have been diverted from marble for a time to try to erect a structure to help some clients visualise a possible sculpture. The proposed sculpture in marble is a twisting stacked form shape. The complete shape would be almost impossible to make in wood and so, after much cogitating, I have come up with a shorthand version. Hopefully this structure once installed in the clients landscape will give some idea as to how the proposed sculpture might look. I think that the scale and volume will certainly be made clear. The picture here shows the structure at night. I am projecting an image of the proposed carving onto the plywood. Only the right hand side could be transposed from the projection as the image distorted as you can see. The projector was precariously balanced on two tables on top of a neighbouring barn roof.