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Most of the wood for these sculptures came from sawmills in the general vicinity of Vancouver, B.C. via mill-seconds bins. The boards are unsuitable for regular commercial vendors for various reasons, often because they have been cut to non-commercial dimensions, e.g. 1.25” x 4.5”, or seven, six or even five foot boards instead of the standard eight foot minimum.
Mistakes are not just made at lumber yards. Occasionally, when making a sculpture, two glued pieces don’t end up exactly where they ought to be, and if that happens several times in a row, it can be necessary to make corrections in the opposite direction to the error to make the average position correct. If, on the other hand, there is a real mistake of a piece glued in a completely wrong position (it happens), then there is about a 15-20 minutes window during which the piece can be pulled away without damaging adjacent pieces. After that, dried glue has to be scraped or chiseled away. If such a mistake doesn’t surface until later, a unit might have to be cut off by sliding the complete sculpture around on top of the spinning tablesaw blade. Mistakes are not happy, carefree occurrences.
People often think of sculpture as subtractive, something made out of a material that was chiseled away to reveal the sculpture. These sculptures, on the other hand, are built-up additively and need a different name, or at least a qualifier. “Algorithmic Constructivism” is a possible, current name. It captures the idea of algorithms, a set of steps; construction is implied, as opposed to removing by sculpting; and the term “Constructivism” itself is a nod to the Constructivist artistic tradition. On the other hand, it doesn’t reference the reliance on single elements. A better name might be “Single Element Algorhythmic Sculpture,” which brings in the idea of rhythm and also retains the more familiar word “sculpture.”
Naming a style is difficult, but so is the naming of each piece. Sometimes, names seem to suggest themselves (“Corner Cadenza”), but usually it is only after considering several pages of names that one is chosen (“Arabesque”). Many names incorporate puns (“Zigzaggurat’); express resemblance to something (“Pirouette”); or reflect some scientific concept (“Zygote”).
Arabesque
Zigzaggurat
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