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.
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.
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.
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.
