Sticky fingers

This is going to be a busy week!  I have about 5 days to get my plans and introduction together for the Rural Storefront installation project. My brain works best bycombining sketching with model building. The above image is one of many camas sketches but with vine charcoal & pastels. An exercise to get my brain thinking about flower bud volume & form. From there I jumped into creating a model. By working on a smaller version, it allows me to figure out what really needs to happen between buds and stem. How can they be packed together and wired to the main stem? What will the main stem be for the sculptures? Wood? Reinforcing bar? Will the entire form be coated in wax? How many camas plants will I produce?  I can already tell I’ll be working with 16 to 18 gauge wire. Look out fingers, there will be pain for the first month!  Below is the start of  individual flower buds for the first model.

By the end of my session, I completed 9 buds and had them attached to a main stem. No open flowers yet, but soon. More photos to come. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with wire, paper and glue. I had totally forgotten how my fingers turn black from bending the dark annealed wire. Then add glue and paper to the forms and yuck happens.  My fingers become a giant sticky black mess that I’ll have to get used to. This is how the next many months will be. Thank goodness water takes it away!

Over the next several weeks, things will become more clear regarding where the sculptures are heading. It won’t be a bunch of gibberish  involving random drawings and weird photos of paper and wire. It will become, I hope, an interesting sculpture that takes you on a different perspective of an important native plant in the Willamette Valley.