Making
From conception
to radiance
I. Conception
II. The Ground
III. The Layout
A piece starts as a drawing. Sometimes the geometry arrives whole; more often it takes several attempts before the proportions hold. Then I choose a round. What I want is a clean surface: no knots, no blemishes, no irregular patches. The wood is a ground rather than a subject, which is close to the opposite of how most people who work in wood treat it.
The layout is where a piece's character gets set. Some are built from compass arcs and measured intervals, a logic you could write down and hand to someone else. Convergence Chamber was built that way. Others are placed by eye, marks made quickly and positions chosen by feel. Variable Axis went that way.
IV. Painting & Aperture
V. Hammering
Painting comes before the nails. Most of the colour will disappear under shadow and steel, but it shows in the gaps. Where a piece has a central light source, I drill an aperture through the middle for it.
Then the nails, several hundred at minimum and often far more. A small piece can go from bare round to finished in a day, if the paint cooperates. Others take weeks.
Things go wrong. A knot won't hold a nail, and that one gets adhesive. On pieces where the nails sit very close together, small differences in the angle each one goes in will stop a pattern reading as perfectly regular. Sometimes I fix that by opening up the spacing. Sometimes I leave it, because a field of hand-driven nails that looked machine-made would be a strange thing to want.
In development: addressable light
A newer group of work replaces the central light source. Individually addressable LED strips run inside the frame, set a fixed distance above the nail surface and hidden behind a wood lip, so the light rakes across the field from the edge rather than radiating from the middle. The strips can be sequenced, which means the shadows move. The first piece is below.
