the start of the photospammage
So, this is like...a serious entry about things I make when I'm being a designer/maker, not a steel fab. Contains pics and explanations of my final degree pieces.
Right, so these dudes are all mild-steel hand cut with an oxy-acetylene torch (totally free-hand). They all started as one big sheet of 0.5mm thick steel.
I do really love my tower blocks. People made all sorts of assumptions about them being linked to 9/11 somehow, but they really weren't in my mind. I can see why others thought it though; they are burnt-up looking and seem very fragile, although as I found when I dropped one down an entire flight of stairs...they're not.
This is a close up of just a few of them. There were actually quite a lot, three sticking straight out from the wall, horizontaly and the rest standing in a random pattern. They varied in shape and size, although they all started out with nice 90degree corners etc.
They were displayed against a two-tone grey background (OMG, I deviated from the all-white traditional art-school exhibition...this got comment.) And then they had two blue and two red spotlights shone onto them. They picked up quite a lot of colour, as you may guess they would, from the shine on the photo from the camera flash. This was the idea. I wanted a basically grey and grimy looking thing to actually be quite jewel-like and beautiful, when you paid attention to it.
I still have all these towers, and one day will either find somewhere for them to live on display, or sell them. And I'm having a sudden fear that I've forgotten what their title is. Oops.
Well, I know what this one's called. 'CT'. And no, that doesn't have to do with Connor Trinneer ;). It's because this thing is so elaborate that I wanted to give it the simplest name possible, and, as it's a coffee table, and I'd referred to it as 'The CT' for a year...you can work it out.
It's all dyed veneer...and the stripes along the edges are made of well over 3000 individual pieces of wood...mad? me? No piece of wood forming this table is over 1mm thick. And it's red, white and blue. (Well, wood-coloured...not exactly white).
I hand-formed it, stuck every layer of striping together by hand...everything. It took me about 9 months to make. Then it's laquered with gloss 7 times and matt once. Phew!
It's entirely made of birch and sycamore, and is formed so even the *grain* of every tiny piece is going the right way.
I feared I'd hate the sight of it by the time I finished it, but I don't. It was my backlash-reaction to the plain IKEA style that is everywhere at the moment. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I felt I needed to make a stand against practical-plain design. So I made impractical-elaborate things.
There were a few disasters in its life, but I'm still pleased with the end result. And my main memory of it is me working late at night and doing something very stupid with a Stanley knife (remember children- the first rule of using sharp knives...'always cut towards a friend') I was stripping down a piece of 3ply...dragging the knife toward me...and it slipped. KuuuthUD...embedded it into the top of my thumb, right through the nail. And my first reaction? To leap away backwards and yell "Get the wood away from me! I can't get blood on the wood!!" Hee...yes, it had come to this. I could NOT let my blood ruin months of work! (And I recovered pronto)
I'd like to sell this piece too. It's not that I don't love it to death, but I feel it will fit into someone else's life so well...it just needs to find a soul-mate.
These are a pair of bedside tables. Cunningly titled "Round Tables of the Night" (none of my tutors thought that was at all funny...)
They're made of sycamore and anodized aluminium. The oval pieces at the top of the tall legs are lights, for reading or whatever, but if you need the toilet/want to check on your kids in the night, you can just pull them upwards and they're seperate things, battery powered, and you can take them as sort of 'torches'...but with a nicer light than a torch beam ;)
I love these things, they're so chunky and heavy, yet very practical (rare for me) and I made them in the last few weeks of my degree, just suddenly struck by the idea. They're lovely things to touch, because the metal is shot-blasted like satin, and the wood is glass-smooth. And they just look great in the right light. Again, the grain of the wood is all perfectly radiating out from the middle. It was a nightmare trying to find the best grain/colour matches, especially when the second huge plank I ordered in was a different colour to everything else! It was way more orangey than the silver-white I wanted. But i got over it, and I love these things.
I did sell them though. (or will have done once I deliver them to the buyer!)
Well...there endeth the sudden insipred-by-nothing artistic chatter! Wow. Makes me feel like I should make things again!
Right, so these dudes are all mild-steel hand cut with an oxy-acetylene torch (totally free-hand). They all started as one big sheet of 0.5mm thick steel.
I do really love my tower blocks. People made all sorts of assumptions about them being linked to 9/11 somehow, but they really weren't in my mind. I can see why others thought it though; they are burnt-up looking and seem very fragile, although as I found when I dropped one down an entire flight of stairs...they're not.
This is a close up of just a few of them. There were actually quite a lot, three sticking straight out from the wall, horizontaly and the rest standing in a random pattern. They varied in shape and size, although they all started out with nice 90degree corners etc.
They were displayed against a two-tone grey background (OMG, I deviated from the all-white traditional art-school exhibition...this got comment.) And then they had two blue and two red spotlights shone onto them. They picked up quite a lot of colour, as you may guess they would, from the shine on the photo from the camera flash. This was the idea. I wanted a basically grey and grimy looking thing to actually be quite jewel-like and beautiful, when you paid attention to it.
I still have all these towers, and one day will either find somewhere for them to live on display, or sell them. And I'm having a sudden fear that I've forgotten what their title is. Oops.
Well, I know what this one's called. 'CT'. And no, that doesn't have to do with Connor Trinneer ;). It's because this thing is so elaborate that I wanted to give it the simplest name possible, and, as it's a coffee table, and I'd referred to it as 'The CT' for a year...you can work it out.
It's all dyed veneer...and the stripes along the edges are made of well over 3000 individual pieces of wood...mad? me? No piece of wood forming this table is over 1mm thick. And it's red, white and blue. (Well, wood-coloured...not exactly white).
I hand-formed it, stuck every layer of striping together by hand...everything. It took me about 9 months to make. Then it's laquered with gloss 7 times and matt once. Phew!
It's entirely made of birch and sycamore, and is formed so even the *grain* of every tiny piece is going the right way.
I feared I'd hate the sight of it by the time I finished it, but I don't. It was my backlash-reaction to the plain IKEA style that is everywhere at the moment. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I felt I needed to make a stand against practical-plain design. So I made impractical-elaborate things.
There were a few disasters in its life, but I'm still pleased with the end result. And my main memory of it is me working late at night and doing something very stupid with a Stanley knife (remember children- the first rule of using sharp knives...'always cut towards a friend') I was stripping down a piece of 3ply...dragging the knife toward me...and it slipped. KuuuthUD...embedded it into the top of my thumb, right through the nail. And my first reaction? To leap away backwards and yell "Get the wood away from me! I can't get blood on the wood!!" Hee...yes, it had come to this. I could NOT let my blood ruin months of work! (And I recovered pronto)
I'd like to sell this piece too. It's not that I don't love it to death, but I feel it will fit into someone else's life so well...it just needs to find a soul-mate.
These are a pair of bedside tables. Cunningly titled "Round Tables of the Night" (none of my tutors thought that was at all funny...)
They're made of sycamore and anodized aluminium. The oval pieces at the top of the tall legs are lights, for reading or whatever, but if you need the toilet/want to check on your kids in the night, you can just pull them upwards and they're seperate things, battery powered, and you can take them as sort of 'torches'...but with a nicer light than a torch beam ;)
I love these things, they're so chunky and heavy, yet very practical (rare for me) and I made them in the last few weeks of my degree, just suddenly struck by the idea. They're lovely things to touch, because the metal is shot-blasted like satin, and the wood is glass-smooth. And they just look great in the right light. Again, the grain of the wood is all perfectly radiating out from the middle. It was a nightmare trying to find the best grain/colour matches, especially when the second huge plank I ordered in was a different colour to everything else! It was way more orangey than the silver-white I wanted. But i got over it, and I love these things.
I did sell them though. (or will have done once I deliver them to the buyer!)
Well...there endeth the sudden insipred-by-nothing artistic chatter! Wow. Makes me feel like I should make things again!