Tall form

I am enjoying the form created by the overlapping segments which I have been recently trying out. This is an attempt to use it on a larger scale. I am unsure as to how it will turn out. I probably need to stand it up soon before I can tell if it is a brilliant idea for a sculpture or er... something else. Tomorrow perhaps I should stand it up to face the truth.

Rough Base

Weeks have past since I last wrote anything on my blog. I have not been idle however and several new works have emerged towards my show in London in June.  This piece here has been re-worked and a base made for it. The Kilkenny base did nothing for this sculpture and I settled on this rough edged Tunisian black marble instead. The sculpture itself is all smooth roughly spherical forms. The external sphere. The internal sphere, and the spherical hole piercing the sculpture. The rough surface of the base contrasts nicely with this excess of spheres. Settling the sculpture down onto this uneven surface was quite a job. The bottom of the sculpture is painted in wet yellow paint, lowered into position, lifted off and the base ground away where the paint shows. The process is then repeated and repeated until the sculpture looks like a broody hen settled in her nest.

Chop chop

This is pretty much a repeat of an earlier sculpture but on a larger scale. I bet it ends up looking quite different somehow. I already have the feeling that this is a little more bunched up than the other one. I love this piece however and feel the idea merits another try. Carving it is following a path I know and should be straight forward. Several days of chopping to remove the bulk of the material as most of this carving is space and must be removed first before the more delicate work can begin. I must be careful not to break this one and remember to do everything in the right order and not to get sloppy!

I have been gently working away at this piece this week. Although it looks near completion I have been fine tuning a couple of aspects. Firstly the shape was not quite to my liking. The ring was not round but squashed on one side. As I sit here trying to describe the shape I think of those round crisp snacks that we used to jam on our fingers as children. I forget their name. After some time of cogitation I decided to thin one area rather than to keep the uniformity of thickness. I think it was the right move. There is no going back at least. Secondly, I have settled the sculpture down onto its base. There was a gap and it is getting smaller by degrees. I want the view from the side to be quite dark. A white strip of supporting marble is visible at the moment and must be hidden by lowering the sculpture some more.

Dropped it

Drat, Blast, Blow, trying very hard not to swear. Bother. Broken beyond repair, what a fool. I even had a little premonition that I was balancing the sculpture in rather a precarious way; but did not listen. Eckhart Tolle says, “ Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it”. Mmm, I am struggling with that one at the moment and cannot face starting again today. When it fell, I held the carving for a moment before letting it go. It was wedged between me and the bench. Why did I let it go? Perhaps I thought it was going to fall on my foot. Drat and double drat!

Rounding everything

Each form has to have lots of attention to make it look like its own entity. I get a bit obsessed with the significance of this but I do believe that the marble absorbs the attention that is lavished on it. This attention remains for ever,locked in the marble, which is, one of the things that makes sculpture so fascinating to me. There is a dark side of this too as the marble remembers all the rubbish too. Perhaps working on a simple rounded form you might be tempted to be a bit slapdash and persuaded into thinking that it did not matter. I think now that, learning from bitter experience, I am sure that it does matter. Perhaps the sculpture is no more than a vehicle for those feelings.

Ring and balls

A new idea. The cylinder in the middle of this ring will be a sphere. A large sphere in a ring of smaller ones. The first bit goes quite fast as I have been chopping away happily. I know however that things will proceed much more slowly now as the space between the spheres will take time and slow careful work. My recent exploration into positive and negative space makes me wonder about the lumpy crescent shape that will arise here. I am not sure if the big sphere will want to be at the bottom or at the side or even hanging at the top. I shall mull over this and hope for some clarity over the next few days.