La Jette

I built this aquatic rig at my mate Jakey's summer place in Sweden. It's made out of scrap material and birch trees from the surrounding woods. There was no electricity or running water so we were living like feral savages and doing everything with hand tools. I almost grew gills as I was in the water for almost the entire week.

Out of Town

No posts for a while as I'm on some kinda Scandanavian tour.

Who wants one?

Despite the ring being just an experiment, turns out that it's very desirable. So I'm going to make a run of them. If you want one, let me know and then I can plan how many I'll make. Depending on demand, they'll be about £100 a pop.
Also, the Llantwit tee's are proving popular, so I'm also going to print off a few of these. The screen won't last for ever so they'll be a limited run. If you want one, get in contact. £15.

In show

This is the work in the show. Go and see it, it's on till October: Chelsea Future Space, the link is on the side.

Going home

This is a micro second on location. I took these images at Nash Point.

Cutting corners

This cathedral of runners and risers was constructed to try and save some time while casting eight 'micro second' pieces. The plan is to create an addition of 10 micro seconds, which I'll sell to pay for the full scale 'second'. I have already produced 8 which, there are some images of in older posts. This lot are the second group. So I should have 16 in total, 6 of which will be used as proof pieces for me, however, this lot came out of the mold all bubbly and feathers. This is the result of sloppy work and I'm having to do them again. This process can not be done by cutting corners.

Over kill

To ensure that the surface of the 'micro seconds' were perfect I decided to mill them. This was not the best solution as the initial piece has natural irregularities that would require so much setting up to overcome, they would take almost as long as the full scale piece.
In the end I used a really scary belt grinder that was always threatening to remove my fingers.

East Hampton

http://easthamptonstar.com/Arts/2011726/Art-Scene-072811

Set up

It took some serious lifting and groaning to get the work in to the gallery, here you see it being unpacked and then on its stand. Professor Stephen Farthing is advising on position.

Been away and now back to the story.

Boxed and ready to go. This super cool crate was made by extreme carpenter Phil Rutter, he had to put up with me loitering around acting like I was helping out. The work sat in this crate in Sally's office for a few weeks before the show. It was so cosy in there it didn't want to come out.

Emily Rubner

Check this astounding stuff out...

http://emilyrubner.co.uk/

Precision Engineering

To obtain this high finish required some intense grinding and polishing sessions. What I have not shown is the welding process, this took forever as bronze is a super conductor, heat runs through it at speed and due to the scale of the piece, it meant that we had a real heat sink on our hands. So at every stage of the welding process I experienced some pretty devastating moments. First you need to preheat the whole thing: 2 hours of blow torching.. great laugh.. then you get old Richard Elliot on the scene (with some support from John, Falcon and Slater) and you blast the joints with a few thousand volts through a TIG welder. Heating up the bronze in to small pools you feed in some bronze rod and then your work is one... or not as it happens. There is a trademark sound that occurs when your weld gos south, more of a CRICK then a crack... I got very familiar with this sound. Due to the extreme temperatures the bronze was twisting like my old man in the fifties, so it just kept pulling itself apart. This event went on some, I had my moments, but with some reassurance from the crew, I finally solved it... not always pretty.
Due to the intensity of the period there is know photographic evidence, no one likes to see a grown man crying.

And I ain't looking forward to the journey home neither..

Those naughty boys from the wood work shop, Steph and Phil made a scale model of a very dandy little sailor. He's out for a jaunt in pretty foul conditions and should know better.. the RNLI will be out soon.

Detailing

I could smell completion at this point, however there was trouble ahead.. a storm were brewing..

What's in the box man?

Show night kicked it and the work seemed to get the crowd talking. There was a lot of touching the piece which I hadn't expected, so that was super cool. I'm going to post the finished sculpture on show in the next couple of days with the final manufacture images, until then here's a micro second of the Severn in a bling out box made with the magic hands of Stef Willis. Deluxe Baby.

A Million Years of Grinding

Richard Elliott

Richard Elliott

Shine on

Getting the surface smooth, the work started to become very bling.

Flip it

Dropping science

This is a shot of the work on a table that I was about to fit some wheels on to. I went through two sets of these wheels because they collapsed under the sheer weight of the work.

In this image you can see the different colours and marks that the heat from the welding  does to the bronze. Another very critical issue is that when the intense heat from welding is put into the piece, the bronze acts as a incredible heat sink (bronze is made up of a lot of copper and copper is a fantastic conductor, heat runs through it at speed), therefore the form of the work distorts and pulls causing cracks in the newly applied weld. Just after the weld is put in, one has to wait a moment or two to see if it's held. This is particularly difficult business and I became very familiar with the pinging sound that a cracking weld makes. I learnt how to weep internally during this part of the project.

Coming together

I can't actually show you me welding as it's very bright and the camera can't deal with it. So this is what it looks like after the weld. To do this I had to preheat everything to avoid any fluctuating in form, it gets pretty scientific at this point and I had to learn quick with the guidance of Richard Elliot. Richard has had years of experience working with the likes of Mike Smith on project for the likes of Damien Hurst and The Chapman brothers. Richard is also a fantastic artist in his own right, he's has a couple of water colours in the H2O show. I pin them up for you.

Alignment

We had anticipated that this might be the most difficult part of the project, expecting that each corner would have its own character and distortion meanign it would be extremley difficult to line this up, however we got lucky. It matched up first time (sort of). The next part of the process was to weld this sucker up, pretty tough stuff as I didn't really know what I was doing.. Bring fourth, Richard Elliot..

Together at last

This is after 82million hours of grinding and sanding, 82thousand bloody fingers and my back bent like a willow tree, the first sight of all four corners together. So this was about half way through the process.

Rock face

When I got the work to this stage I was tempted to leave the surface like this, it looked very interesting at this point.

Hangin