All Strings Attached
Mid top detail
Abstract and psychedelic. I look to my world for inspiration beyond the trap of the literal. Nature is patterns and systems, symbiotically living and interacting through life and death. The same dance, together.
By mounting this form on a bearing, I hoped to animate the visual magic of strings attached to everyday actions, made with the best intentions.
All Strings Attached
Reflecting
Refracting
Eternally striving to generate a wake of love
What if we were connected to everything else with lines, and could see our actions react across the fabric of landscapes, both physical and mental? Consider the impact, looking at not just your carbon footprint, but your emotional footprint as well. What kind of 'invisible' damage do our actions inflict?
Take a shape. Build four sides. Add more sides. Now eight sides become ten sides. I enjoy the challenge that comes with taking flat sheets and creating completely three dimensional objects. It's wild bringing something tangible and new into this world; drawing patterns on paper, cutting materials, shaping them.
I build puzzles and reverse-engineered details for paint. Twisted wire around her form and connected important moments in the DNA strand with juicy cell-stacked berries.
I used my mig welder, pretending I was a human 3-D printer, and buzzed up patterns of weld, emulating the bumpy skin of shells. These are gifts you would find at the top of a dessert - creatures fallen to the bottom of an ocean.
At the end of all that fabrication, I had a naked steel body that was a wonderful patina; a mix of mild steel blues, smooth welds, and smokey black-brown nooks and crannies. Many people would have been satisfied with a clear coat.
It was never my intention to build a steel sculpture, so I had her powdercoated and all the details disappeared. I wanted to create a whirling seed pod; a glistening crustacean.
By utilizing the pearly jewel tones of brushed-on chameleon pigments, her surfaces became as lit up and changeable as leaded crystal. In the end, she became both alien and familiar, organic and geometric ... just as I had wished.
All Strings Attached
2016
7' tall x 2 1/2' wide
Multi-sided, whirling, rainbow explosion
Photos: Lee Orr
On a one year lease to the City Of Nelson