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Artist in Residence
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JULY JOURNAL
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Wednesday, July 5, 2006
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My drawing for the Paine commission. I make drawings for anything I think I might want to make. Drawing helps me refine ideas, scale and process. I will use the drawing throughout the fabrication process to check the form and dimensions.
This piece will be large, just under 8’ high. I enjoy working on large forms, but they are hard to place so it is very nice to work large knowing I have a home for the piece.
The form of this vase will be welded of bronze, a material I have never worked with before in this scale. It will be finished with a few hundred slip-cast ceramic flowers.
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Here is the bronze I ordered from a metal supplier in Colorado. The material is 3/8” thick round stock, each rod is twelve feet in length. |
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To start, I have to cut up all this material with a chop saw into pieces that I can bend by hand. My intention at this phase is to recreate the outside line of the vessel many times with as much consistency as possible. The vessel will have 36 vertical ribs, so I must make 36 exact outlines. I am not strong or agile enough to bend and control the rod through the whole length of the form. Cutting bars into smaller pieces, bending them, and later welding them together again allows me greater control.
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To determine the exact shape I want, I return to the drawing with tracing paper, outlining the form. I bend the first rods to exactly conform to the outline on the tracing paper. These master forms are then outlined onto my worktable, and successive bars are bent to conform to the outlines. |
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I bend all the materials cold without heat or formal jigs. I use posts welded to my worktable that allow me to use leverage to bend the material. The more curves, the more difficult it is to bend. For the top curvy part of the vessel, I could bend about five pieces an hour. The hardest part is not the form, but trying to bend the material in only two directions. |
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Bending the bronze rod to the outlined shape drawn on the table. Vice grips and hammers come in handy. |
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Here are all the pieces cut and bent to shape. These 180 parts will be welded together to make the 36 vertical ribs of the vessel. |
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Thursday, July 6 - Wednesday, July 12, 2006
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After bending the parts into shape, they are welded together to form outline. You can see that my layout table is a bit short, so I am supporting part of the bent rod on a small steel table to the side so the material lays flat as I weld it together. |
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The side elements welded together. |
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Each of the 36 side elements must be marked to indicate where the horizontal elements will be added. This decision was determined on the drawing according to the circumference of the form. |
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Using the drawing as a plan, I lay two elements directly on it and weld them together using crossbars. |
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This simple outline is then welded upright onto bronze rings that will become the lip and a point near the foot of the vessel. |
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The lip is a bit bigger than the foot, so for stability I am working on the form upside down. I slowly add vertical elements, holding them in place at the foot (the top), and welding them at the bottom (the lip). You can see I have added straps to help hold the wobbly lengths of bronze in place as I work. |
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The vessel with all 36 vertical elements welded in place only at the lip (the bottom). The blue tape at the foot (the top), will be removed as I weld those parts. There are several straps corseting the form that will be removed as the vertical elements are welded into place. |
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After welding the vertical pieces at both the top and bottom, I made a steel ring, approximately 44” in diameter, and slipped it over the exterior of the form. The ring, segmented into 36 parts, helps assure that the ribs are evenly spaced before I begin adding vertical elements. |
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Thursday, July 13 - Wednesday, July 19, 2006
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I forgot to mention last week that for me, putting the vertical ribs together and seeing the from for the first time is one of the most exciting parts of making the work. Even though I know how large it is going to be, and am working from a drawing the whole while, the moment when the vertical elements come together and the form is realized in three dimensions is always exciting and far richer than looking at two-dimensional drawings. It is suddenly form, and the way you read it visually and physically is always new.
The process I began this week is one of the more slow and unexciting parts of my process, welding in the horizontal elements.
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Last week I was using a steel ring, which you can now see lying on the floor, to hold the vertical elements equidistant from one another. I have now welded in the true horizontal bronze pieces where the ring was. |
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It is important to me that the horizontal bands are flush with the surface of the form, so that the entire skin will be continuous. In order to do this, I bend bronze rod into roughly circular forms, and then cut segments that will fit between the vertical elements. Here are segments I have cut on the chop saw.
I have figured that there will be approximately 46 horizontal bands, each band is comprised of 36 small segments, and so I will cut over 1,650 small bronze segments to weld into the frame of the vessel.
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I have marked the vertical elements to indicate approximately where the horizontal rings should be welded into place. To weld them in, I hold the bronze segments with pliers or vice grips, and weld one side only, going all the way around the piece. Then I go back to make sure they are as linear as possible, and weld the other side. |
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It takes me over an hour to weld in each horizontal ring. After they have all been welded into place, I will also weld them from the inside. |
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Here I am welding in the bits…bit after bit after bit. I cannot recommend welding in shorts, I tend to get tiny burning bits of bronze in my shoes, but it has been very hot this week! |
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Thursday, July 20 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006
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It’s been another hot week of welding bits, but I am close to being done with this part of the process.
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I have welded in horizontal pieces from about the middle to the top edge of the foot and then flipped the piece and began filling in the shoulder and neck. I had hoped to weld in most of the segments with the piece right side up, but I needed to weld in a lot of material before it was stable enough to rotate. |
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The progress is slow and can be discouraging-but there is a beauty to me about the idea of the small repeated gesture. My hope is that the whole of the piece, from concept to fabrication, will become more than the sum of so many parts.
On Wednesday there was a quality check by my daughter Wren-at a year and a half, she is very interested in the shop, and not at all put off by the general filth. |
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You may not have noticed, but my (garage) shop is looking much more like a real work place from when I started this journal. My husband Bill installed some much appreciated light fixtures and got rid of the sofa, and on Wednesday electricians came to install new outlets, eliminating the web of extension cords that littered the space. I even have some new welding and safety equipment.
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Over the weekend, I visited my friend who is helping with the ceramic part of this project. This master artist and mold-maker is transforming the blossom I fashioned from modeling clay into glazed ceramic, and I am so grateful for his help! Having worked briefly in ceramics, I give him and other ceramic artists much credit. Ceramics seems temperamental to me, from the various clay bodies, to firing challenges, and the alchemy of glazing.
Pictured on the left is the blossom I made of modeling clay. I used it to create a simple plaster three-part mold to make multiple blossoms in wax (second from left). I gave wax flowers to my friend who used them to create another plaster mold and is casting a several hundred blossoms in a very durable ceramic clay body (second from right). He will underglazed them in white and finished them with a very pale yellow overglaze that you see on the right.
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Ceramic materials shrink during firing. The clay body my frie
omparing my original modeling clay sample on the left with the finished glazed ceramic piece on the right. |
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Thursday, July 27 - Wednesday, August 2, 2006
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This week I finished adding all the horizontal bits. After last week, I only had the top and the bottom left to do. Here you can see that the top has been finished. |
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And a closer look at filling in the bottom. You can see my cut-up assortment of bits, each pile measured and cut to fit at an exact spot. Even after all this repetitive work, I still get excited when one step becomes close to completion. |
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Welding in the last rows of the foot. |
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And it’s done!
Or at least this part is done. Although I cut the bits to a specific length for the horizontal bands, there are still small gaps that have to be filed with welding material on the backside of the weld. So now my task is to weld each joint from the other side. |
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To help me navigate around the piece, it has been moved to the steel table. I am accustomed to moving work myself, but the scale and extra weight of the bronze in this piece makes it a two-person job. |
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Sticking my arms through the grid and maneuvering the welding gun within the vessel, I weld each joint from the inside. Every six joints or so, I rotate the vessel a little to have access to unwelded joints. |
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Looking inside the vessel from the foot, you can clearly see the difference between the joints that have been welded and those that have not yet been done. |
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Having the piece on the table allows me to work from inside the lip and foot, giving me access to areas where the grid is so small in scale that I cannot insert my arms or welding gun.
I had hoped to finish this step by Wednesday, but still have a little to do before the next part. |
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Continue to August Journal |
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