Lost Boy

Back in December I did a little photo shoot with the wings up on the roof of my studio in Bermondsey. John Fitzpatrick kindly agreed to model for me and valiantly suffered shirtless in the freezing cold for hours. Being the first of a planned series of photographic projects I was still trying to figure out exactly what I wanted out of it. I was trying to get the sense of a lost, surplus remnant of some past necessity. A dated vision of a soldier trained and paired with this machine to be an advanced weapon but the war is gone and he no longer has a purpose or place in the post-conflict world. I’m not entirely sure I’ve got it yet but here are a few of shots from that day that I quite like.

Propellers of Course

Propellers, propellers, propellers…. what beautiful things they are… sleekly simple in concept, stunningly complex in geometry.

I needed some. So I made some.

What follows is a photographic document of the making of my propellers for the Heavy Angel sculpture. Each propeller has three blades and each blade is three sheets of 9mm marine ply thick with an interlocking central disk system. I spent a morning in the Science Museum’s aviation section studying various propeller designs before settling on the below profile design.

I marked-up and jig-sawed 18 blanks and glued them up in stacks of three creating my six blade blanks.

I then needed to figure out the shape of the blade within this block, mark it up and carve it out.

This was done by masking off the shape as it appears on the edge of the blank. I then made a series of cuts along the blank

and chiseled and filed off the excess wood to an approximate shape.

Then I sanded and refined it by hand and with a small bench mounted belt sander.

Then I did the same to the other side.

The blade itself has an aerofoil shape with a fat leading edge and thin trailing edge which needed to be considered during shaping.

Next they were filled, stained, sealed and varnished…

…and sanded and varnished and sanded and varnished.

 

And here they are.

It was very much a process of trial and error and it bears the scars of that on the blade to the lower right of the above picture. That was the first blade I shaped and the initial cuts were too deep. I quite like this though as it exists a some kind of visual history of the learning process; a reminder that at the beginning of this I had never made a propeller before.

Heavy Angel Armature Progress Side View

Here is the side view which seems much less exciting at the moment but should begin to develop swiftly.

Click here for the front view

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Heavy Angel Armature Progress Front View

I have begun building the armature for the figure that will be wearing the aeroplane wings I’ve already built and are visible here. I decided to build the armature as flexibly as possible so that I can continue to adjust the pose as I go along, thus it is hinged at the shoulders, elbows, knees and up the spine. None of this structure will be visible in the final piece and the figure will be robed leaving the hands, face and feet as the only exposed parts so I thought it would be useful to document the construction of this, perhaps, unnecessarily complex armature. This is the front view and there is a side view here. I photograph the sculpture after each session and will try to update this slideshow regularly so you can see how it’s coming along.

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Singularity (Take Face, Break Face, Remake Face)

Here is a little slideshow of the calibrated mirror field installation I did for the recent Variant Space exhibition. The photos are taken in sequence as you move around the mirror field passing the single point at which the image is whole. This point only occupies two or three inches of space in the room and is very difficult to find so I placed a spyglass in the correct spot to aide the viewers as they wondered what on earth they were doing. If I install one of these again I would like to set up a camera to record the expressions of the viewers as it suddenly dawns on them that what appeared to be a disorganised mess is actually an excruciatingly precise device. 

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Variant Space at the Grosvenor Gallery

I recently exhibited with Justin Fitzpatrick, Rebecca Glover, Miriam Maselkowski and Katherine Prendergast in our group show Variant Space at the Grosvenor Gallery in Mayfair. Justin works at the gallery which was very kindly donated to us for the duration of the show by its directors in an effort to support young artists who would otherwise not get a chance to exhibit in such spaces. I displayed part of my work in progress Heavy Angel – a pair of aeroplane wings constructed in wood. They will eventually be clad in aluminium so I was glad to have a chance to show the complex structure that I’ve spent months designing and building in the studio. I also created an installation called Singularity (Take Face, Break Face, Remake Face) which is essentially a device consisting of hundreds of calibrated mirrors that collects predetermined colours framed on the opposite wall and focuses them at one point in the room, rendering a mosaic image when viewed from this single viewpoint. It took about 40 hours to install and worked perfectly, conjuring an image almost impossibly out of the opposing disorder of the framed colours.

The show was a great success and I hope to take the Singularity project further in future as well as complete the Heavy Angel sculpture which I have been working on for almost a year now.

I will post photos from the show as soon as I have edited them.

Variant Space at the Grosvenor Gallery