Fruitylicious

Hey there. Has it been a while or what? So what finally brought me back? Well, as the end of summer  rolled around, I was always biking past a particular tree. This tree was covered in deep green leaves and was dripping with bright orange berries. I couldn't get the tree out of my head, and I decided that I really wanted to try to capture it in mobile form (you'll have to read to the end to see the finished product). 

So back to this tree.. I fell in love with working with 'abstract' pieces again while working on it. I simply let the tree evolve into what it wanted to be while I was sculpting it. Also- it is painted! As you may have noticed in the past I have stuck with mostly just the plain sheet metal. However this time I felt it was time for some color. Let me just say- painting metal has brought about its own challenges, but I am slowly perfecting the process. 

After completing the tree- and being very happy with myself- I realised that I had to keep going. That's how the lemons, tangerines and avocados came into being. As I thought of these fruit pieces as experiments, I kept them as smaller wall sized sculptures. I intend to explore this further and try out some more fruit and veg this way.  I'll stop chatting now so you can go check them out for yourself.

P.s.- if you're in the area, these are all on display in Galleri SoHo, Gallerian in Västerås.

Stockholm & the Museum of Modern Art

Big Fish in the Sea

Ohhh this big fish. Did I mention this fish was big? When I was commissioned to make a larger version of my original fish sculpture, (albeit a different species of fish) I was excited, because it meant I would be venturing into new territory with my sculptures. When I say new territory, I mean a cross between super intricate cutting methods of metal, more parts than ever, and heavy pendulums- which my current materials just weren't ready for. Did I learn a lot? Yes. Am I happy with the end result. Hell yes. Did this sculpture push me and annoy me to bits.... Yes. New techniques/ newly learned: 

• Bolting wires to metal parts. This tidbit I had borrowed from Calder himself. When I visited an exhibition on his works in London, I carefully studied how he managed to construct his larger mobiles- and bolts were utilised everywhere. 
• Using thicker wires. There were certain parts on the fish that needed to have quite a long "arm" from the pivot point so as to place them correctly. Well, my high ductile, skinny fencing wire just wasn't cutting it anymore and was bending all over the place. So I used some of my engineering skills, and ordered the appropriate poles in stainless steel to hold up the weight correctly. Looking back, I wish I had used the stainless steel everywhere. I know for the future then.. 
• Patience. The tail itself took 3 hours of carefully cutting on the CNC milling machine. The fish has 13 pieces total. You do the math. 

This project was a huge undertaking, but as always, hard projects make you grow and develop the most. Hope you're as excited as I am to see what is to come.

 

Huge thanks to Erik Nordén for the beautiful photography.

Flowers, hanging and potted

These pictures have been a work in progress for a while now I must admit. Moving sculpture just doesn't translate well in a picture in relation to experiencing them in real life. With that being said, I am excited to show you what I have been up to. I'm grouping all of these pieces into a category which I call my experiments. Before these pieces came into being, I was working on more intricate sculptures such as a huge fish, small fish and delicate flowers. These works required me to sit in front of a milling machine hours on end, so that I could produce the intricately cut parts needed to bring these creatures to life. However I think I lost a bit of the fun in the process, and so I stopped producing art for a time. This period of rest gave me time to think about my art, and how I needed to keep going forward as I knew it made me happy. Well, as I have heard before, a wish is just a wish without a strategy. I knew I needed to make changes to the way I was doing things so that I could inject passion back into the making process, and take a break from sitting in front of a machine for hours. 

So how did all of this culminate to the following sculptures? To bring joy back into the making process, I gave myself the rule that I needed to make each sculpture during a singe 4-hour period. Therefore, the parts had to come together quickly, they still needed to be interesting, and altogether still work (as in balance). To solve this, I turned to scrap metal that I found lying around the workshop and got busy making flowers which simply are bolted together. Oh yea- you may notice a rock or two as well (again, easy parts to pick up and add). These limitations allowed me to experiment with my art in a more care free way as the pieces didn't need to resemble a specific organism as they did in the past. And I realised I had successfully injected the fun back into the making process. I will definitely still make intricately cut sculptures in the future, but now I know that I need to take a break from time to time with experiments such as these.

 

A woman with something to say

I went to a gallery exhibition recently which was featuring the late artist, Pia Thelander. A group of friends had also joined my for the exhibition, and I remember chuckling as I gave them a tour around and told them how I felt like one of those group leaders in a museum or something. We started off by the table which sat two pictures of the late artist herself. From one of the pictures Pia looked like a total badass, and the other she just had a huge smile on her face. I would remember these pictures and what she exuded while looking at her art. The remainder of the tour (as in, the rest of it than the very beginning) was a shuffle of people throughout the large space which was full from floor to ceiling of bright colours and loud, in your face prints and paintings. A section of these paintings focused on her love of the "Cans" print. Later I would listen to her husband tell the story of how Pia was particularly drawn to aluminum cans that had been run over by cars on their travels abroad. The two of them would walk around with bags of these cans, just to take back home with the sole intention of printing them.

During days when the gallery is relatively quiet, and I am working on my own work, it is really great to be surrounded by such color and in your face art. It's inspiring, and from certain works (such as those with paragraphs of handwritten notes and huge collages of word prints) one can look again and again and find a new grouping of words, or see a hidden print in the collage which you didn't notice before. Pia is still there in her work, and she's still saying something.

The exhibition is available to see until March 7th at Societé KSK in Gallerian, Västerås.

 

 

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