Quick Updates

Sunday, May 5th, 2013 @ 1:06 pm

handshouse, obelisk, refinish, sculpture, study, wood

Hey all, been a crazy year.  Just now as things are ramping up to reviews and winding down from classes, I thought I’d shoot a bunch of things online that I hadn’t shown off yet.  So along with two other posts about major projects, and more of those to come, here are some little things I’ve played with this past semester.

The Browns, of Handshouse, led a class last semester on the techniques used during the 1800s to lower, transport and raise the obelisk that is now behind the MET in New York City.  Built in Egypt, lowered onto logs and rolled into a ship whose waiting hull was left open, workers sealed the hull, sailed the ship to the new world, opened her back up again and rolled the obelisk through the streets of New York to its final resting place.  There is debate today about the monument staying in American or not, as there is about many old ‘acquired’ objects like it, but our class focused on replicating historic technology to scale, and we did.  We didn’t get to a trial run, but it was certainly interesting to work small-scale, and to think about forces and weight and dealing with that engineering side of things in a structure, something I don’t get to do at the scale I usually work in.

Stacks of 2x4s, domino-ed and glued together and then ground down into the shape you see here, fitting the contours of my body so that I may lie in it comfortably.  Unfinished.

I was hired to refinish two pieces of furniture for a local artist, mostly involving cleaning up the pieces, matching stain color, and giving it back a sheen where I’d taken it off.  Shellac was a good friend on this project.

Part 1 of my wood stacks study.  The rotten walnut log I had would lose any magic it had to look at as soon as I took a tool to it, so I resorted to simply slicing it up.  Definitely struck a chord, as many people got excited when they saw it, and it started me on a miniature lumber yard idea, a trend which I’m still following…