learn to sculpt

This one is about 25cm high and about that wide. It’s an alchemical retort and receiver flask done up as a soldered steel wire sculpture.

This one is steel and copper wire, about 30cm tall. I call it “Mouth to Feed”

Last week I bought a 1000mm x 400mm x 60mm slab of red gum timber to make the jaws of the Neolithic Workmate sculpture. One edge still has the rough bark line, and I plan to leave that as is. It will be on the fixed front jaw side.

This week I planed the slab smooth and ripped it into two 400mm wide planks on the table saw at school. I’ve also cut several fallen eucalyptus branches into the various parts of the two H-frames; these I am joining with mortise and tenon joints for strength.

The base will be a red gum frame with woven willow twigs in between forming the step platform. This is partly to reduce weight, but mainly because it should look cool.

Rather than break my expensive lump of flint up into lots of little, useless pieces, I’m trying out knapping with beer bottle glass—much cheaper.

It’s going to take time, but I’m beginning to get glimmerings of the idea.

I’m making an all-wood folding portable workbench as a sculpture; it will be a sort of Neolithic Black & Decker Workmate. I’ve just bought 3+ metres of 2×6 red gum plank to get a start on it.

I would love to used Mulga (a very hard, dense acacia wood found in arid areas, such as the Flinders), but I didn’t think to gather any while I was on walkabout at Iga Warta last week.

A1 Timber in Hahndorf (just 25km from my house) had some Mulga in stock, but it was quite expensive. I reckon it would have cost over $100AU for enough billets of Mulga to do the job.

Sigh.

Anyway, I also bought a 20-lb lump of flint to try my hand at flint knapping for yet another sculpting project. Maybe I can make a set of Neolithic chisels to go with the Workmate :)

A gross of paper airplanes. This doesn’t look nearly as impressive in the photo as it does in person.

This was from February. It hasn’t been fired, yet, though it does seem thoroughly dry.

... about a hundred twenty paper airplanes left to go

I’m making 200+ paper airplanes for my sculpture class. I’ll be making all sorts of variations, colors, sizes, and then I’ll pin them up like butterfly specimens in a museum.

The past two weeks we’ve been sculpting heads from life. We didn’t have a regular model, so we sculpted each other. It’s really weird sculpting someone who is simultaneously sculpting you, sort of a mutual voyeurism.