Finished Wire Sculpture

Woot Woot!!! It's all finished! I ended up going with little strips of nylon tights pulled between layers of the spirals. Am pretty happy with the way things turned out. Also, this is it for playing catch-up! From now on, my blog posts will likely not be nearly as prolific.







Artist's Statement:

This work represents much of the way I approach creating art. There is an order to it in the geometric shapes of the triangles and the unending circles that spiral around the frame. As I work, I try to draw order out of chaos yet still allow part of the work to build itself. The curve of the spirals, the varying shapes of the skin—these all show places where I gave up control and just let the piece build itself. Sometimes this lack of control resulted in imperfections, places where I began working only to discover that my ideas were flawed or at least not right for the piece. There are scars from ideas that never came it to fruition: burn marks from failed soldering attempts, random scraps of glue that I couldn’t quite scrape away. But these imperfections are what makes it unique and gives it an organic quality.

I found inspiration for this piece in architecture, yet my end result seems almost nautical. I love how the white fans spiral around the base rods, like sails on a ship. Even the shape itself is reminiscent of a sailboat.

Finally, I chose the name Ambition for this piece because it shows the hopes I have for my future works. The rods that form the triangular base are sturdy, representing the foundation of my learning. My intention in using spirals as a main feature of this piece was to give a sense of growth; as if left on its own, it might continue to grow beyond the frame it currently relies on. And someday that is what I hope to do as well.

Wire Sculpture Progress

So here's how it's going so far:

Not too shabby! Overall, the frame is pretty sturdy. In addition to wrapping wire around the joints to secure them, I coated each one in super-strength glue. This was both good and bad, as you'll see later.

The only trouble is deciding where/how to attach the skin.....

The wire spirals are a bit off-center around the triangular frame, but since they're only attached to one post in the front and one in the back, there's not much I can do to correct it.

So here is the trouble with the glue. On one hand, it works great; all the joints are now secure and the wires don't slide around on the frame anymore, which is AWESOME. The only trouble is, I didn't quite realize how the glue would foam up as it dried. Nor did I realize how long it would take to dry and how oozy it would be until it did. So, I ended up with long foamy globs of glue running down the length of all the rods and coating each joint in an ugly semi-transparent/yellow-tinged blob. By the time I discovered the mess, it had dried too much for anything to be done, so I let it harden completely. Thus I spent the better part of my afternoon taking a box-cutter and scraping away hardened glue. The joints are still a bit ugly, as you can see above (I did scrape a bit more after taking the pic), but not bad.

Now to figure out the skin....I've been experimenting with ribbon, paper towels, tissue paper, and normal fabric, but haven't been able to come up with anything satisfactory so far. 

Beginnings of the Wire Sculpture

After finally deciding on the tower w/spiral, I set out for supplies. In the end I got three 1/4" steel rods, and a coil of 14 gauge steel wire. Totally forgot to take pics, but they looked something like this:

To start out, I stuck two rods in a vice and pulled until I got the angle I wanted. Then, to create the slight swoop of the front piece, I bent the rods around a car tire. The third rod was cut in half and also bent before being attached to the other pieces to create two identical triangles. Kind of like these drawings, but the top is not so rounded. Definitely more a triangle shape.

Originally, I had hoped to solder the pieces, but after some unsuccessful attempts, I discovered that steel does not work with silver solder. So I resorted to wire-wrapping instead. I attached the triangles at the top point and at the center of the bottom cross bar.

From there, I went about attaching the wire coil to the post legs with little wraps of wire. This worked well, except that the wire tends to slide up and down the rod, messing up the spiral. I'll probably have to resort to glue eventually. 

15 Idea Sketches

For the first project we are supposed to make a 3D linear structure from a 2D drawing that focuses on line and cover it with a skin. Here are a bunch of ideas that I played around with while trying to figure out what I was going to make for our first project.
The bigger cube was my very first sketch, thus terrible. I was having a hard time picturing in my mind how the lines would look, thus the perspective is totally wrong for some of the smaller cubes. The second, smaller sketch was my second try, and did improve a little, but I still wasn't thrilled with the concept overall.

I really love the look of a double helix, and but this design just didn't quite turn out to be what I was hoping for.

The spiral designs on the left were an idea I almost picked. Within the coil, there was supposed to be a tangled wire "net" on the second-to-last level. Out of that net, wire tendrils were going to climb up and cling to higher levels of the coil. On the right were two ideas for hanging sculptures with many spirals swirling about in the center.

This design was the one that I ultimately chose, though I've had to make some alterations to it due to my skill level and the materials I had on hand. Someday I'd love to try it again with different materials  so that it more closely resembles this drawing.

I really like the bottom design, sort of a cup/flower/something hybrid. Figured it'd be a bit complicated for my current skill level though.

As for the rest of these, they were just ideas to play with. I never had any real intention of making them, so admittedly, they're not all that great. Sorry the lighting is so bad on the last one. I drew really lightly. I think I counted 15 unique designs, so that's happy!