Spine 1

 Just finishing a large sculpture inspired by the human spine, made from surplus 4x4 truck parts.  I got to thinking about bones and their shapes and the relation to the desert during my time in the Great Basin and have done several reclaimed wood pieces in the same series, Bone II & III.

Remnant II completed

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.)

In the beginning . . . 

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.

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.

The remnants needed to be guarded from over zealous garbage collectors . . .

The Canyon Table -- Part 4

The legs of this table are designed to mimic the branch structure of the Gambel oak trees outside the studio.  After being welded, ground, sanded, and beadblasted to remove weld spatter and mill scale they're powdercoated.  In the meantime the top gets a series of sanding and finish coats.

The Scoop Table -- part 1

There are a few materials that have held my attention for the past 20 years, and plywood is one of them.

Individual sheets of birch plywood

Plywood is really the workhorse of furniture and construction, yet most times it gets covered by a veneer or painted over.  It is the weird old uncle of the wood world, the one everyone likes to have but no one wants to see.

Layers of birch plywood being laminated together

My first explorations into plywood were to make a series of boomerangs – when sanded the plys emerge and make fantastic patterns that visually accent the airfoil shapes needed to make the boomerangs return.  High-end cabinetry often uses birch plywood, which differs from construction-grade plywood in that it has many more sheets laminated together and has virtually no voids from the gluing process.  It is a fantastic material – because of the cutting and orientation of its layers, it expands and contracts very little with the seasons and moisture content of the air.  The grain of each ply is oriented 90 degrees to the last, so it can be ripped on the table saw in any direction without much worry of splitting, and it can be loaded across each axis as well.  In addition, when sanded through the plys, the end-grain alternates and gives the edge a striped pattern.  Why we would want to hide such a fantastic material underneath a veneer I don’t know.

One of my current projects is to make a steel-based table with a carved plywood top.

 

Metal can actually deform significantly when welded, and I take a lot of precautions to insure that it remains in the shape I want it to.  Often times I will tack weld all of the pieces together before giving it the full weld bead, this way it holds itself in proportion as the individual parts want to expand and contract with the heat of the welder.  In this case I even tack welded extra supports for stability on the cantilevered parts that will be removed later.

Tack welds

Full weld beads ground down