Three Material Project

Requirements

1. Three different materials:
   – One must be wood
   – One must be recycled
   – One must be a material you have never worked with
2. Minimum four feet in one direction
3. Thirty per cent of the piece must incorporate a void, or empty space
4. The finished piece should be “elegant”
5. Get to know your power tools

Process Stage 1

I visited a friend in the Architecture program at the University of British Columbia and was inspired by two things: eight feet of old yellow fiberglass pipe insulation we found and a student project producing concrete public benches that reincorporated the wood forms they were cast in.
So I felt like bending these yellow fiberglass tubes (my recycled material) and make them look more organic. And I wanted to try concrete (never worked with it) to contrast mass and shape. And I wanted to reincorporate the wood form into the sculpture (another recycled material). Plus I’d been recently inspired by Duane Elverum’s (professor in Industrial Design) lecture series on sustainable, enviro-friendly design and problem solving, so as much as possible use recycled, or re-purposed materials. And finally the assignment mentioned thinking modularly, i.e. creating a large sculpture that can be (dis)assembled, installed and then taken away easily.

The final sketches for the overall piece and the concrete form.
After a very productive and fun series of sketches and ideas, I wanted to go vertical, to suspend my concrete in the air, and to create some sort of punctured voids, and contrast the planar and linear shapes of the wood and concrete with the curved tubes.

Process Stage 2

Final form construction, testing and pour.
I asked questions from those with experience (Elverum, my project instructor, artists, a home designer, a carpenter, the shop techs). Of particular note, I really didn’t have a concept of how dense concrete is. So on everyone’s advice I scaled back from 36”x24x6” to 20”x16x3”, which still weighs in at about 75 pounds.
Mixing concrete was uhm, fun. After I hauled the 55-pound bag over my shoulder from Windsor Plywood to Emily Carr I needed to catch a taxi ASAP to buy a second bag when the form was only 2/3 full of wet concrete. I also mixed it by bare hand. The aggregate tore my skin up and cement is caustic, I think, and it dried out my hands like a bad hangover and peeled my fingers for days.

Left: The components: cable suspension, metal tubes, nail pins, foam tubes (which also remove from the) plywood base. Right: Detail of the concrete with one of three side-loading pin secure system.

Thoughts

The piece turned out surprisingly in-line with my original plans, which is both satisfying and unexciting. I partly feel I didn’t explore the idea of shape and void as much as I could have. I still feel more excited about the variety of sketches I created and wonder if executing one of them would have been more satisfying.
Perhaps I settled on my original plan too closely, or too soon, or got caught up in the technical details more than the ideas.
I also feel a sense of guilt for creating this large chunk of cement (and for buying new foam insulation) that will now fill some landfill simply so I could suspend it from a beam at school for half an hour. Designing sustainably takes hella thought and planning.
One of the more interesting aspects of the project was keeping everything modular, which I pulled off well. I also managed to avoid using fasteners (screws, nails and clamps) for the form and only two for the final piece.
Creating the curved tubes was also particularly fun. I carefully inserted equal lengths of straightened rebar wire along the length of the foam tubes, enabling them to maintain their curve after I flexed them into position. Guiding the wires without them poking through the side required three senses: eyes watching for sings of penetration, ears listening for it tearing through the foam, fingers feeling for the wire beneath the surface. It was meditative, subcutaneous experience.

The final piece, suspended. Approx. 4x2x1 feet.

Tools and Materials

• bicycle tubes (recycled)
• drill press
• hand drill
• clamps
• table saw
• mitre saw
• plastic sheet

• plywood (recycled)
• foam
• steel cable
• nails
• wire
• steel tubes (recycled)
• concrete