Potato anyone?

Sculpture tutor Andrea Roe dropped by with a couple of her students from Edinburgh College of Arts to have a look at the repair shop. We talked a bit about how the project worked, and most of the students had naturally also something broken with them. One of the good things about art students is that some of them will of course bring art works of their own which have gotten stuck and can’t be further developed. One such object was the old sponge Fiona Beveridge handed in. Looking back on my notations about the object I see that she has written that the problem with the sponge is that it looks like a potato. I am not so sure if I agree, but maybe the potato essence of the sponge has more to do with a collision of artistic aims, the specific aesthetics of the sponge, and what Fiona expects of herself as an artist.

Try to solve this one.

Responding to the dilemma of endless doubts and hesitations hampering an artist, I asked one of my assistants to quickly turn the sponge into a Rubik’s cube, but one that can never be solved. You can squeeze and turn it for ever, but no matter how much you try, the coloured squares will never line up. It took my assistant about half an hour to finish the sculpture, of a game that can never be solved, made from an artwork in progress halted because of hesitation. I hope Fiona can squeeze it like one of these anti-stress toys the next time she gets stuck in her creative projects.

Sometimes a simple gesture is the best.

Object no. 64

Internet research of the local area.

One of the things Rosemary Fraser brought to the repair shop was a map of the local area, printed out from the Internet on the back of already used A4 papers and stuck together with cello-tape in a kind of grid. She said her husband had printed it out and that they had it on the wall until it started to fall apart, as things like these tend to do. I immediately liked the associations I got from this simple object spanning from our industrial past (the map was from 1870) and connecting with our post industrial and hyper communicative present. If the print-outs on recycled papers weren’t going to withstand the test of time, but instead showed how easily and directly accessible information has become, this was in itself an image of our age. Could I preserve it for the future by translating it into a material more typical of our past?

A lasting form of documentation.

I decided for ceramics, since this is a truly ancient material for recording information which also survives age and erosion better than most materials favoured by mankind. It also lends itself unusually well to map-making, if one wants. There was also something about the sheets of paper coming apart as the cello-tape dried, that reminded me of ceramic tiles. I figured that if I cropped the map a bit at the top it would fit just fine on nine 15x15cm clay tiles.

The texture is very visible up close.

I set about transferring the map, topography included, onto clay slabs. This was a very time consuming task. I made five of the tiles myself, and had four different assistants making one tile each. I was careful to make sure we all worked in the same style, showing the assistants in detail how I sculpted all the different elements of the landscape, not because I thought my way would necessarily be better, but because if we all worked in a similar way I hoped the results would also be similar. To my astonishment it worked so well that the finished tiles were almost inseparable in style.

Since the tiles are monochrome, texture is all.

Just as the paper map once hung on the wall, I imagine that the tiles would also belong on the wall, but maybe integrated with the bathroom tiles or over the kitchen sink. Since the map shows the local area, including the house where Ms Fraser lives, it wouldn’t be wrong if the ceramic map was allowed to become part of that house.

Newhaven harbour, in the old days.

As an additional curiosity, when she saw the tiles, ESW’s director Irene Kernan told me that a medieval pottery had once been located at the site of the new ESW building. I found it comforting that random decisions by visiting artists will always turn up meaningful coincidences that can be included in the stories of artworks to widen the way we read them.

Object no. 7

This immersionheater coil unfortunately never made it to the finish.

Kim McIntosh came in with a lovely old immersionheatercoil that her plumber had salvaged from her old boiler. We were all quite enthusiastic about it since it was all rusty and broken and corroded, covered with beautiful shades of brown and bronze, and I had just started planning its new form when we were warned that the strange white powder leaking out of it might just be asbestos, not so fun anymore. The coil quickly ended up in the skip, and Kim was now without an artwork. When the council workers at the recycling centre later told us that the old coil had most likely been entirely harmless, I felt even worse, and decided to try to make Kim something else. I got my chance when someone else’s digital camera yielded plenty of interesting parts to work with, allowing me to create something small for Kim, even if it didn’t have anything to do with her immersion heater.

A small device that offers an alternative view of the world.

Extracting the viewfinder from the camera, and mounting it inside a hollowed out decorative wooden curtain-pole end-stopper, I fashioned what is much more a viewing device than a sculpture, since it’s for looking through rather than at. Because of the optics involved, the view one would get holding the Big Picture in front of one’s eye, is an extremely small and focused image of what’s really there. To get any kind of overview one would have to endlessly turn and twist to slowly bit by bit scan off the surroundings, and add the many impressions together in one’s mind, a bit like when managing and planning one’s life.

Object no. 5

A car that has stopped running. Out of petrol?

Boys play with cars. Small boys play with battery driven cars, while big boys need petrol for theirs. Which is slowly running out (some claim). This RC mini had definitely stopped running anyway, battery or not, so what could I make of it. It was my guess that the cars very young owner would appreciate simple and absurd humour, so I asked one of my assistants to model a really fat guy that tried to squeeze himself out of the car. It’s fun to give over control like that, and very healthy for an artist to do that. Allowing other people to make some of the decisions in the creative process opens up fresh interpretations that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself, and they might not even be aware of.

No more driving for Vince.

I think Rachel was aiming for the Michelin man, but to me the fat little man looked much more like an ancient fertility figure or other stone age carving, apart from having the wrong sex of course, and riding a mini. But why not re-imagine the toy as one of few traces of a lost civilization. Maybe our future descendants will make car figures to remember and bring back the happy days when man didn’t have to walk with his own legs just because he wanted to get somewhere, and could get just as fat as he liked without it impeding his life the least.

Archaeology of the future.

Object no. 49

Not as functional as they look.

Michael Tweedley likes ice climbing, and when one goes ice climbing it’s useful to have long steel spikes stuck to the boots, but apparently these crampons were not so well designed, so Michael rather handed them in to the repair shop than have them fall off his boots while dangling high up from a cliff-side. I think that was very smart. When Michael came in with them, we both got joking about how aggressive and macho they looked, and decided there and then that I should try to soften them up a bit. To me they really looked like teeth, so the next step felt sort of obvious.

Soft and sharp at the same time.

I got the teddy from a pound store, and got tinkering with a simple mechanism with a bite. The teddy head is stuffed, but the jaws are made of plywood and spring-loaded. I stuck the head on a board, like a hunting trophy, but to me he is very much still alive, as alive as a teddy bear get anyway.

Teeth, trap or dental guard?

Artworks that rely on a contrast of ideas or images play with our expectations, and the most important thing is to get the meeting of opposites right, so that people see both the separate entities and the collision of them at the same time. Even more important however, and often overlooked, is the feel and character the sculpture is shaped with. All the small, subtle details that make up the final form all contribute to the associations the audience will get. In the case of Bear trap, I personally found it really important that not only the spikes were visible, but also the short steel lips designed to hold the heel of the boot, which I chose to display a bit like if the crampons were not really the teeth of the bear, but rather some kind of dental guard or muzzle. The image reminds me of the muzzle strapped on Hannibal Lecter’s face in Silence of the Lambs. Maybe the teddy was once an ordinary cuddly soft toy, but for some cruel reason the steel teeth were forced upon him and he turned into a monster.

Spring-loaded teddy jaws.

Object no. 38

Nice toy that doesn’t run any more.

This brio toy train belonged to Gabriel Young, and was apparently a favourite toy of his. But it didn’t want to run any more, despite his mother Louise’s attempts with different combinations of batteries. Maybe it had just derailed one time too many. Since Gabriel was very young I wanted to make sure before starting to work on the train, that he understood that it wouldn’t exactly be a toy after I was finished with it, but he seemed to have grasped the idea of sculpture about as well as many adults, and after getting it back he was very clear that it now belonged on the mantle piece and not in the toy chest. I still wanted to make a decidedly childish sculpture, and tried my best to relate to the imagination of a small boy when turning the train into The Last Train on Earth, driven at ferocious speed down the train tracks of the galaxy by a green alien. Did it make sense? For a child I hoped it did.

Bigger, better, faster.

Object no. 6

Was this ever used, or was it just intended to inspire melancholic remembrance of times past?

This brass bed warmer (one would fill the brass container with glowing cinders from the open fireplace, and then slide it under the duvets to chase away damp and cold) looks like it was maybe not intended for use, but rather made at a time when such devices were mostly hung on the wall to remind oneself how romantically poor one’s own grandparents once were. However, Annette Sheppard whom it belonged to, found it neither attractive, useful or very interesting hanging on the wall.

Same shape, different function.

The shape however, with its long neck and round body, reminded me of an instrument, so that’s what I decided to make of it. Granted, a very simple instrument, but still one that worked. Instrument builder and musician Casey Miller gave me an electrical pick-up that I installed inside the body just under the bridge to catch the vibrations of the string (a brass wire for hanging paintings)and a left over tuning key from a cannibalized electric guitar made it possible to put tension in the string.

Very simple but surprisingly sturdy and well tuned.

I had Casey, who advised and assisted me on my different instrument projects for this repair shop, test it, and he was very happy with the result. Maybe it performed well because it was so simple. Without frets it could only be played as a slider, or a one stringed bottleneck, but when played so it produced a full and balanced bass tone that one could pluck along on, perhaps as accompaniment to some other brass instruments.

Casey Miller testing the brass-band bottleneck.

Object no. 46

A powerful motor locked in a plastic shell, the way we are used to them.

The problem with the jigsaw Jane Gray gave us was that despite creating a lot of noise and vibrations, it didn’t jig its blade any more, and what use is a jigsaw that doesn’t jig!? It was fascinating though, this noisy and powerful remainder of a once useful tool. Made me think about how we just take the force of technology for granted. We have all these handy and useful forces at our disposal, trapped in plastic shells and powered by an umbilical cord to the national grid, and we don’t have a clue what goes on inside.

Revealing the insides.

I wanted to show those insides, but still keep the shell. The most fun would have been to first repair the machine, and then house it in a perfectly transparent shell, but since that would have taken up most of my time for the rest of the project, and further risk failing anyway, without having access to specialist chemical engineers with knowledge about transparent polymers, I decided on a simpler solution.

Half transparent, half closed.

I cast a plaster moulding around the jigsaw, then after removing half of its  plastic shell poured clear polyester resin in the mould with the jigsaw still inside. The resin flowed all over the machine parts of the jigsaw, encapsulating them while still keeping them visible. This way the jigsaw became a kind of ghost of its former self, with more of its mystery revealed but without any other function.

Half visible, half solid.

Object no. 13

Eyes of the future.

Everyone has one, at least in their mobile. They are rather boring to look at, but are meant to look through, not at, so that doesn’t matter. What most people don’t realize is what’s inside all digital cameras. I didn’t either, but since the camera in itself is such an uninspiring object, I decided to take it apart and find some interesting parts, which I did.

They look very ordinary, but looking through them is all but…

The LCD screen in any digital camera consists of several separate layers of thin plastic films. Two of these are polarizing filters, one horizontal and one vertical. I guess they help prevent glare and also direct the light from the screen directly at the user. But if you pull them apart and hold them up in front of your eyes, they diffract incoming light and break up the image a bit like a kaleidoscope, but much more random and colourful. I carefully glued these filters to pieces of clear perspex that I installed in an old pair of glasses (I wanted to avoid adding refractive correction to the already diffracted colours and image fragments caused by the polarizing filters).

They look ordinary but make the world extraordinary.

I found that while wearing them most people could hardly take a few steps out of fear of walking into doors and other people, and were confusedly looking around them, but all with a big smile on their face.

Object no. 40

A Merry Christmas, or the beaches of Normandie?

This Christmas decoration definitely changed character after Fiona Harris’ 8 month old Labrador retriever figured out it was great for chewing on. The broken edges and sharp punchy holes made me think more of the heavy steel caltrops deployed by Germans on the beaches of Normandie to stop allied tanks, than of stars. But even spikes pointing in all directions obviously couldn’t stop a happy dog. So what to do, if not retrain it. I decided to design an object much more powerful than Pavlov’s famous bell in chasing obedience into a badly behaving canine.

Try to get a grip on this one, on the right end.

The dog biter is a very effective device when it comes to get on equal terms with your dog. The additional range is very advantageous against a fast and furious foe, and even extends further when jaws are snapped together. Just don’t get soft when the battle begins, as the dog will certainly, as proved before, bite and tear into any spikes if you hold them still long enough. No, the best tactic is speed and force – advance snapping the teeth repeatedly, if your dog turns around, then bite his tail, if he doesn’t, get a hold of the scruff of his neck until he gives up. Remember, he would do the same to you if he was in possession of the dog biter, wouldn’t you?

Debi Banerjee demonstrates the Dog biter.

Just remember not to be unforgiving when your dog gives up. This also counts for boyfriends and husbands. A yelp and big wet eyes usually mean that they have learned their lesson. The dog biter is further useful for picking fruit from trees, keeping burglars off your lawn and as an anti riot instrument (possible for both sides of the argument). Please be aware, any violent use of the dog biter is not the intention of the artist and can only be attributed to your own bad judgement. Best of luck with your dog!

Object no. 60