Already a highly aesthetic and suggestive object.

Castle Ceetch is one of my favourites from the ESW edition of the Repair Shop, not just because of the final sculpture but also because of how well it was made. The small and delicate ceramic salter Ms Glover brought in was already very suggestive in itself. It was clearly hand made and had been given an almost organic shape by its maker, but the broken off top, with its uneven jagged edges, to me at least, turned it into a ruined tower on the top of a lonely hill, overlooking a dark, brooding forest. A very romantic object. But it also held several other associations, to tourist trinkets, handicraft, beloved kitsch and memories of travels and places. I wanted to turn the salter into this romantic kitschy tower, but without changing it in any way, as it was almost perfect as it was. The solution was to create a setting, or a pedestal, that would suggest just those associations to other people to.

You can almost hear the squeaking of the bats living in the tower.

When I say I particularly liked the way this piece was made, I really mean that the collaboration with the assistant worked well, because the shaping of the clay was all up to Cecily Hughes, one of the ECA students who helped me for a few days each. Any time you delegate part of your work, what you hope for is that those helping you understand and share your vision, not that they follow a set of precise technical instructions. In this specific case I saw immediately that Cecily “got” what I wanted to happen, both on the level of cultural meanings and associations, and as a language of forms and shapes. That she wasn’t an expert with ceramics was then absolutely no problem, since the image we had in our head, the sculpture we were working towards, was the same.

You could still keep crushed pepper and salt in the courtyards.

The instructions I was giving Cecily while she was working then, could be aimed at helping with craft knowledge and design tips, but that would lead to the result we both already agreed upon. Because of this, I could leave her mostly to it, after an initial discussion, and then a short more technical briefing once she got her hands into it and hit the first obstacles. I think this way of working is the most satisfying for both artist and assistant, apart from also leading to the best results. The artist (or in other jobs, the manager) doesn’t want to spend time micro-managing details, at least that’s the way it should be, and the assistant surely doesn’t want someone looking over their shoulder all the time, but rather someone who encourages and supports when needed. Successful micro-managing is impossible anyway, since there is no technical language so precise that it can exactly describe and define what you want to someone who doesn’t share your vision. You can try but you will only get frustrated. Also, it assumes that you always knows best, wish is hogwash of course. Even if you might have more experience and skills in a specific technical area, if it is not your own hands doing the job, your task is to give the one actually doing the job the instructions and tips that they need to fulfil the task.

The small details is what makes it in the end.

Object no. 39

Used to be 3D, now 0D.

Liulu Ehrlichman was one of a group of art students who came in to see the Repair Shop, all of them bringing with them something they had themselves tried to turn into an artwork but given up on. The laconic description she wrote on the receipt says it all, -I broke the lenses out off them. Indeed she did. But then she stopped there. I guess one of the things I really learned at art college myself, was making informed judgements on what art worked and what didn’t. This new heightened awareness can sometimes become a hindrance though. If you think too much about the how and if the art works, you might not even get the ideas in the first place. At least that is my experience. So I decided to turn the glasses into an aid in that process.

Also a cool fashion statement when going to openings.

It’s not that I think seeing the world through a plus and a minus changes your vision in any way (other then limiting your peripheral vision a bit), but the knowledge that you are doing this, and that other people are looking at your glasses and interpreting them as such, can serve as a reminder that judgments are based on nothing more than collectively agreed upon cultural conventions. And that successful art often rely upon self aware manipulation of those norms.

Object no. 65

Nice old oak, but getting a bit loose in the joints.

Apart from this old, rickety chair, the two sistersRobin and Rowan also came in with a broken lamp stand and a table leg, that their parents had allowed them to take to the Repair Shop. They were so spirited and enthusiastic that I definitely wanted to give them something fun and useful back. I had just made the banjo (no 2) and started on Ocarina (no 23) so I was into instruments, and thought that the nicely turned lamp stand would make a nice wooden flute or horn if combined with the similarly turned oaken table leg, but alas, my skills as an instrument maker are pretty limited. I managed to put them together into something vaguely believable, but not a sound came out of them. Luckily for me the sisters had been provident enough to bring not just one, or two objects, but three, which gave me a final shot at surprising them. The chair blocked up a bit in my head for a while, as I couldn’t get a good (and useful, for two little girls) idea out of it, until I remembered that we would soon have Christmas.

Would probably need some extra runners to get up a bit more from the ground.

The shape was really there all along, inside the chair, just waiting for me to make the connection, then turning it inside out so to speak was easy enough. I don’t know how well it runs though. Maybe it turns out as hopeless in a snowy slope as my flute was as an instrument. That is one of the dangers of making sculptures that are expected to do anything more than just being looked at.

Perfectly bent wooden runners.

The problem that I can foresee with this sled design is that the mid-croos-beam, where the back used to be attached to the seat, will scrape against the ground in thick snow and impede speed (which on the other hand might be a good thing from a health and safety point of view). The obvious solution would be to glue two new bits of hardwood, scored on the top to allow for bending, under the runners to lift the whole sled an inch or so off the ground. Wish I had the time to do it then, but I finished this sculpture on the very last day, and didn’t find any suitable wood lying around.

And a disclaimer is never out of place.

Object no. 37

Ethnic handicraft from some exotic destination.

Working so fast and intuitively as I do in the Temporary Art Repair Shop, things often turn up that are psychologically and aesthetically interesting, but maybe not so suitable. Caroline Wilson came in with a small wooden box, one of these ethnic-craft things made of really nice hard-wood but with second rate fittings and detailing. I guess it was intended as a key box or something, but ms Wilson had wanted to give it to her very young daughter to play with. It’s just that the small round glass in the front was broken, which made it dangerous for children’s hands, and she also found it a bit dull. My response was to leap directly from the idea of changing the sharp broken glass into something the opposite, and also that small kids would recognize. I removed the glass, sanded the edges soft, and also stuffed the box with parts of a teddy bear. I figured it would make sense in a tactile way for a kid who hadn’t really started speaking yet.

Turned out to be a very strange object.

Then one of my assistants saw it and asked, -Isn’t that a bit Freudian? And of course she was right. Very Freudian indeed. But the thing about Freudian slips (if I may call it that) is that they are unconscious, they happen because for some funky reason your perform highly significant associations and mind-jumps without even noticing it. That’s part of the beauty with this spontaneous and fast way of making art, that you discover connections and meanings you wouldn’t get at if you sat down and thought for a long time, rather than just pursuing the first idea that popped into your head. The problem though, was that this box was meant for a wee girl, which made me very concerned with what the parents would think. Oh gosh…

You can hide your “keys” between the legs of the teddy.

So we tried to take the object away from that simple Freudian interpretation. We made the opening look like the gate of a house and added house-like decorations. But that didn’t help either. The soft house, or the house that is hard on the outside but soft once you get through the gate, is if anything even more Freudian. Blasted. Once you’we started down a Freudian slip there is only one way to slide, further and further into it. So there was nothing to do but admit failure. The object was quite successful anyway, just not suitable for kids, so I simply admitted defeat and explained the thing to ms Wilson, suggesting that the Soft House end up somewhere else than in the children’s room, in the grown-ups bedroom perhaps? Where Freudian slips are not only allowed but sometimes even wanted.

When working in the UK it is always good to stick on a disclaimer.

Object no. 45

Really quite an interesting, minimalist shape.

When Iain bought this knife block in a charity shop four years ago he could of course not know thatonly two of his knifes would fit in it. Annoying! I guess you would just assume that a knife block would hold most normal knife sizes, wouldn’t you? And even if you didn’t, what were you supposed to do about it, bring your kitchen knifes with you to the shop to try them in? (A suspicion that I can’t prove, is that the block ended up in the charity shop in the first place, precisely because someones knifes didn’t fit in it).

You can still see the original shape, but now in a Rorschach kind of way.

What triggered me into making this sculpture was the new shapethat I immediately saw hiding inside the wooden block, and the simplicity with which I could liberate it. Just a slice straight through it, a slight bevel to the edges, some glue and there you go. The added meaning that a knife block gains when it assumes the shape of a stealth bomber or fighter drone is something else. This is an instance of random poetry which is often a feature of everyday art, working a bit like associative parlour games or theatre exercises. A+G=? More than suggesting a specific reading I think simple assemblages like this one work more like a starting point for thinking about the phenomena involved. The drone in the kitchen – the everyday precense of war – how we rely on weapons (being used somewhere) for us to be able to continue our cozy everyday life – how weapons become something very ordinary in some times and environments – how kitchen knifes can of course also be seen as weapons.

Hoovering over your head like a threatening shadow as you fry your breakfast eggs.

I suggested to Iain, that if he was really wild he could stick magnet knife hanger strips under it, to hang his knives from, so that if he hung it high over his kitchen workbench, he could just reach up and grab one when he needed it. I couldn’t do that myself of course, for reasons of liability. Imagine what horrible things could happen if the knife you returned to the block didn’t catch properly and fell down, or if you accidentally dislodged more than one knife when you reached for only one of them… but then again, imagine what horrible things could happen if you sent unmanned robot drones armed with explosive missiles and controlled by jumpy twenty-somethings to a foreign desert search for baddies that looked mostly like everyone else in that area?

Object no. 56

An accident happens so easily.

Eve Ferguson collects milk jugs, sort of. It was a particular shame that this one broke, since it was given her by someone once very close. It’s a very small and delicate jug, with an almost hand made feel to it. Given the narrative it already carried in a poetic way, I wanted to fix it, but without repairing it. Some things you can’t just glue back together again, but then again, maybe that’s also ok? So I decided to help it instead of mending it, by adding a kind of support that would make it useful again. I used fired and glazed clay, to keep with the original material, but made the supporting structure a separate piece. I also wanted to make it as light and unobtrusive as possible, so as not to take the attention from the fineness of the jug, but still in an honest way showing what is broken.

A kind of handle prosthesis maybe?

I often get back to what an amazing material ceramics is. It breaks so easily, but the pieces last almost forever. That is why archaeologists use pottery shards to date almost all old pre-literal civilizations. You can be certain that the pieces of broken clay pots you find around an old settlement date from around the same time as they were deposited, since everyday cutlery didn’t survive the challenges of the bronze age kitchen any better than they do our modern ones. But once broken, the shards can still be dug out 4000 years later, pieced together and analyzed for patterns and decorating techniques. The changing fashions in pottery design then help the curious archaeologist date the vase and the site of the find. Maybe us humans and our relationships function in a similar way. Relationships break all to easily, but the broken pieces and traces could be understood just as well by another human being thousands of years later, since all that changes in human nature is the fashion on the surface.

Title on the bottom, where it’s present but out of sight.

Object no. 3

Anne Moar came in with an object as beautiful as it was strange. It immediately made me think of dead corrals, or bird bones or dried lichen or some other mineral left over of an organic life-form, even though it was strictly industrial. The funny thing is that its look probably didn’t influence its design very much at all, but rather that the ideal form for it to fulfil its intended function just called for a slender, fragile and organic shape.

This is what it looks like already mounted on my sculpture.

The thing is one of the  ceramic elements or flues for directing the gas flow in a gas fired open fireplace, its curved and irregular shape probably helped produce a nicely irregular fire. Since its shape had been so happily shaped by its function, I wanted to turn it into a new object whose form was also subservient to what it could do, but still beautiful for it. I decided to follow my association to sea creatures or alien life-forms, which got me thinking how we can blow a tune in a shell, and then it took off and became an instrument.

You don’t blow into the fireplace flue, but it supports a string.

Building up a body for it I worked in clay, shaping an ocarina style base that apart from working as a flute also held a thin string suspended from the original ceramic element. The tricky thing with ocarinas is that the tuning derives from the relationship between the total volume of its inner chamber to the total size of its openings (covering one or more openings changes their total size which produces different tones). I managed to shape the clay until it produced a couple of clean notes, of which one was satisfyingly deep and merman like, but firing clay also shrinks it, slightly changing the relationships which my tuning had depended on, and throwing it all out off balance. Sadly the sounds coming out of the finished piece were not as clear and crisp anymore, but I guess they did sound more alien and strange. How do they do it, how does anyone manage to tune an ocarina correctly? I don’t get it.

Maybe more tactile and auditory than visual?

Object no. 23

Some plastic stuff.

Ok, it was really broken, a glitch or something stopped it from lighting up at all, but Zoe Fothergill also questioned the sense of manufacturing fairy lights powered by a solar panel at all. Which is very true, I mean, when are you supposed to use them anyway, on a sunny day on the beach or in the garden? It wasn’t very hard for me to get the lights working again. I just ditched the solar panel which was pointless anyway and got another set of fairy lights (very similar design, probably made in the same city somewhere in China), this time battery powered. A bit of swapping the cables around got me the lights shining. Then blinking, and finally (I had two set of lights now after all) blinking alternatively between two colours. But what was the point of it? What was it I was looking at here? Pausing and considering that for a moment I concluded that more than any other sign or meaning or image, what this object was communicating to me was, -I am made in China. Which I also decided to make it say.

I am what I say I am.

Object no. 51

It is really incredibly light, and not at all that fragile.

This sculpture is the last I finished for the Temporary Art Repair Shop in Edinburgh. Not because it was hard to come up with an idea. It was clear to me immediately when Gordon Munro came in with this little broken RC helicopter what I wanted to do with it. Rather it was getting the right materials, making the mould, letting it set (and air out a bit, since polyester always stinks so terribly for a few days after casting) that took time. It was mainly the dark front cockpit of the toy copter, and how half translucent the body is, that much more suggested an ancient dragonfly than a high tech toy vehicle.

Will people in the future find plastic toys stuck in real amber, or will we have cut down all the trees long before making that impossible?

I was happy that the idea I got for this object can be seen as reflecting on aspects of sculpture, historically and now, as I had several good conversations with Gordon about sculpture and how it is taught and presented. Is Ancient Future a classical or a modernist sculpture, is it a pun or a fake, is it a ready-made or a fiction? I was also happy with how bits of plaster from the mould which got stuck in the polyester resin ended up looking like the chalk deposits you can often find on raw pieces of amber or flint.

A chunk of amber this big would be worth a lot of money, even without a toy helicopter within it.

I wonder how long this piece of fake amber will survive. Polyester resin is itself pretty hard stuff, of course not as hard as stone, but amber itself started as soft resin that slowly petrified during millions of years under the ground. Will the lump I made eventually end up under ground, were it will get further compressed and chemically transformed into some kind of super amber, or will the resin slowly grind down and dissolve into the huge polymer sludge we are leaving for our grandchildren’s generations? Maybe the polymer sludge itself will slowly change and transform over coming millennia, into new layers and deposits of oil and chemicals.

You can just about see what is hiding inside, but you could also easily imagine it being a huge insect.

Object no. 28

The ultimate man toy, or at least one of them…

It’s a bit unfair perhaps, but when I got my hands on Derek Sutherlands old electric guitar, my first thoughts were not all the things I could turn it into, but rather how I could use different parts of the guitar to finish other sculptures I was working on. I ended up using bits of the excellent, dense and very dry wood for the head of sculpture no 11, the legs of no 24, the elephant spider, and for the bridge supporting the single string of Brass band bottle neck, no 46, which also got one of the tuning pegs. The real beneficiary though was no 2, Rejuvenate, the old banjo that got the entire electric innards from the guitar transplanted into it. So, to compensate I of course had to come up with something just as boyishly and rebelliously wild as an Axe.

I never had time to test it, but I hope it shoots straight.

The super light carbon fibre bow is not very strong, but then the Man Toy is not intended for dangerous use. I imagine instead something much more playful, like a Wilhelm Tell style game of shooting cigarettes directly into the mouth of your friends (just remember to wear safety goggles, no really, you should!) The string is one of the original guitar strings, and with the mechanism it’s the same as with all mechanical artworks. You fiddle and fiddle and fiddle, and then when it finally works, you pray that it will continue working for a while. I do have some bad experiences with making sculptures with movable parts, and have promised myself repeatedly not to make any more, but they are so much fun…

I realize that the shape makes this sculpture a bit awkward to hang on the wall, but maybe it could hang from the ceiling?

Object no. 44