Remnant II is the sculpture I just completed for New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc-- it was constructed during the Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake at their booth in the convention center ('booth is a relative term -- NB had a two story space with in the convention center that spanned 50' x 60', and it wasn't even the largest there. The OR show is nuts.)
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| In the beginning . . . |
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| Remnants |
The challenge was to use remnants from the shoe manufacturing process (ie, the swiss-cheese-like leftovers of fabric and leather after the shoe parts were cut out) to make a sculpture that could be assembled during the convention as a visual and performance art piece. The visual language of the sculpture needed to reflect several values that drive their process: simplicity, craftsmanship, and performance. The remnants were from the New Balance domestic manufacturing plant in Maine, and I used steel and fixtures that were milled and distributed in US.
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| Fixture detail |
I welded together a structure that would support the remnants as they were stretched across it; primarily I was interested in how much material and in what configurations a surface would form. Usually we think of surfaces and planes as solid spans of material like a sheet of plywood or concrete sidewalk, but I was curious to see how little material could be used to imply a continuous surface. Many of these planes were three-dimensional as well; not a single piece of the welded metal beams was straight and as a result the spans of fabric were twisted and bent from two dimensions into three. It was interesting to find out through talking with several shoe designers that the same process applies when they are fabricating footwear -- it begins with a planar, flat piece of material that is then stretched and coaxed into the decidedly three-dimensional form of a foot-like object.
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| The remnants needed to be guarded from over zealous garbage collectors . . . |
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