sculpture

Robotic, puppet and tape giraffes!

Posted by hil

Giraffe

Andrew at PuppetVision (now here) kindly told me about Make’s report on this huge robotic Electric Giraffe, aka Rave Raffe, a walking vehicle built by Lindsay Lawlor. It’s design follows the mechanism of a toy Tamiya giraffe:

The front and back legs opposite each other step ahead at the same time, propelled by an electric motor. When those legs land, hydraulic brakes lock the wheeled feet, and the other two legs take a step. Canting from side to side, Raffe lumbers ahead at about a mile an hour. A propane engine runs only to recharge the batteries, so the beast is quiet and efficient. When Lawlor let Raffe shuffle off alone in the desert, it walked for eight hours.
— Popular Science

You can follow the building process through to it’s completion in time for Burning Man 2005, when it fulfilled Lawlor’s original purpose, to see Burning Man from a height. The giraffe has done various gigs since then, most recently appearing at Maker Faire. (Still going 2014) Plans are now to add ‘computer-controlled flashing giraffe spots, an electroluminescent circulatory system and a gas grill’. :-)

Some other giraffes of note:

Oona Tikkaoja’s sculptures

Posted by hil

oona

I love the look of the sculptures that the Finnish visual artist Oona Tikkaoja makes, in particular her wolf creature (fourth pic along) and lizard robot killer. They are soft sculpture.

I also think her wooden horses are spectacular. They are beautifully jointed, and immediately conjure up thoughts of the mythical Trojan Horse. Take a look at the photo showing the construction, with all the clamps!

(via Extreme Craft)

Updated links 2015

Ronnie Burkett’s Paper Mache Recipes and other things

Posted by hil

Having seen Ronnie Burkett‘s amazing Tinka’s New Dress in its last season at the Melbourne Festival in 2002, and heard him speak so inspiringly at the Puppetry Summit there at the same time, I was interested to see Burkett’s article on paper mache (via Puppetry News and Views).

The article talks about recipes for making one’s own paper mache pulp, and the various situations they are useful for, but Burkett also says that much of the time he now uses a commercial papier mache pulp called Celluclay. I thought it would be ideal for a court jester’s marrotte that I was making, but its hard to come by here, so I tried Mix-It, which is made in Victoria. When I tried an instant paper pulp before many years ago, it was quite lumpy, but this mix turned out to be nice and smooth to work, and dried really hard and white.

Marrotte
The head was sculpted over a wood and polystyrene base, so that the layer of paper mache is relatively thin, which has the advantage of taking less time to dry, and being economical. It’s also non-toxic and takes paint and finishes of all kinds.I did like reading that Burkett also suffers from impatience waiting for casts to be ready and things to dry.
Marrotte

Olavi Lanu’s ‘Reclining figure’ sculpture

Posted by hil

This is a dawn picture of one of my favourite sculptures in Canberra, on Ellery Crescent outside the School of Art. Its by a Finnish artist, Olavi Lanu, and was made in 1982.

You can see it enlarged and from a few different angles here.

At first I really did think it was group of real granite boulders that just happened to look like a person sleeping. I like imagining that rocks or mountains are slumbering spirits that sometimes might stretch and come alive to go about their business when no-one is about. Of course there are lots of stories along those lines; the ancient stone creature in Patricia Wrightson’s children’s book The Nargun and the Stars comes to mind.

But Lanu’s reclining figure is made from fibreglass resin, presumably on a wire form. Apparently it was originally covered with moss, but over the years lichens have taken over. There is another figure by Lanu not far away, but sitting among some trees.

‘Ron Mueck: Boy’ by Gautier Deblonde

Posted by hil

Amazon UK has a couple of copies of the book ‘Ron Mueck: Boy’ by the photographer Gautier Deblonde. This is a photographic diary of the nine months it took to construct, ship and assemble the sculpture in Venice. It was the ‘Art in Photo Essays’ award recipient in the World Press Photo of the Year, 2001, but seems to be out of print at present. I was interested to see the sculpture in segments, and crated.

Snowflakes and Paper Cutting

Posted by hil

Make-a-Flake is a cool flash application that enables you to make snowflake patterns like the ones we cut out of paper when we were kids. They have a gallery of the beautiful patterns that visitors to the site have made, and you can add your own.

Playing with the snowflake maker reminded me of the work of Béatrice Coron. I particularly like her vast but finely-detailed city scapes, such as Innercity; ExCentriCity; and Chicago. Also, SagaCity, the cutting edge is a photographic account of Cororn’s installation at the Chicago Center for Book & Paper Arts in 2003.

Its interesting to see the other directions in which Coron’s book art goes. For instance, she has recently make a 9 foot high stainless steel cut out sculpture called ‘Working in the Same Direction’ to represent the first merger of the Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services in New York City, in which the design of two panels is like an open book preserving ‘the independence of the two separate entities sharing a common goal’. I also like the idea of the two weathervanes — a fireman and an emergency medical worker that ‘move with the wind, watching in all directions’.

Here are a few other papercutting links that I have been interested in:
Diana Bryan’s Shadowtown
Gerlof Smit,in particular his Delicate cuttings.
ChinaVista
Sun Erlin: A Cut Above
A Chinese Zodiac

Another Howard statue update

Posted by hil

As I mentioned previously, Greg Taylor’s satirical John Howard statue was to have a showing at the National Folk Festival. The Green Left Weekly Online has a report and picture of the statue standing festooned amid a Field of Hearts that were made in support of refugees.

According to Art Almanac, Maitland Regional Gallery is showing Taylor’s statue from May 7 to June 7 in its first officially sanctioned exhibition.

Endangered Butterflies: Ken Yonetani’s Installation

Posted by hil

I got chatting to someone out at Walker Ceramics in Fyshwick yesterday, who was telling me about an installation that took place in the CSIRO Discovery Centre late last year. Ken Yonetani, a post graduate student working in ceramics at the Canberra School of Art, made 2000 tiles, each 30cm square and only about 5mm thick, fired in the Japanese ‘fumie’ style tradition. The tiles took about 6 months to make, and were white and fragile, with an image of one of 6 different endangered butterflies cast in relief on each one. They were then laid wall-to-wall on the floor in various spaces in the Discovery Centre, and the people who had gathered for the launch were invited in… Within a short time the tiles were broken into tiny pieces. Jeff Doyle’s article in the Journal of Australian Ceramics, ‘Ken Yonetani’s installation at CSIRO Discovery, ACT’ gives pictures and details of the installation, including the reactions as people realised the implicit metaphor involved in the destruction. Cool stuff!

I still like the butterfly alphabet posters that have each letter illustrated by close-up markings on butterfly wings. Apparently they took 24 years to source.

Ron Mueck again : Big Man

Posted by hil

I’ve come across two new links for Ron Mueck since my previous post about his work. There is a very unimpressed review by Adrian Searle in the Guardian in March 2003. Secondly there is ‘A Conversation with Ron Mueck’ by Sarah Tanguy, in the International Sculpture Center’s July/August 2003 magazine Sculpture. Mueck talks about the making of his Big Man sculpture in particular and in detail. There is a really interesting sequence of 6 photos which show the progress and techniques that were used.

Update: I noticed today (30 Oct 05) that the second link about the making of Big Man had been changed since I made the original post, so I have corrected it. I’ve been getting quite a lot of hits here, presumeably because Big Man is on show in Paris, so do take another look!