After my helmet sculpture was finished, I felt more confident about building more ‘soft sculpture’ designs. The next piece I created was a large eagle-shaped artwork. Unlike the helmet, which only had a few embroidered patches on its surface, the eagle would have dozens – and was going to be massive in scale. It would be supported by a large steel rack, similar to the kind they hang clothes off of in department stores, but much bigger. Here is a sketch of the concept design:
Although this piece didn’t have quite as many tricky shapes as the helmet (i.e. no curved elements) it proved to be far more intensive to build. Firstly, I had to translate the cutting pattern onto giant sheets of artificial leather – about 16 metres of it. Then I had to sew on the ‘applique’ elements – all of the stripes of colour and such that created the key design elements…plus things like zippers which I had never worked with before. Then I had to add all of the embroidered patches – which had separately taken me a couple of weeks to stitch. Or rather, it had taken my embroidery MACHINE a couple of weeks – while I stood ready to change threads, fix jams, prepare hoops, oil the machine…and all of the other things that make it a full-time babysitting job. I’ve been nothing but happy with the embroidery machine …but it definitely takes a lot of work to run! And that is in addition to all of the time it takes to convert an artwork into a stitching pattern in the first place (not to mention drawing the artwork in the first place).
Here are some shots of the Eagle sculpture in process:
The final photo is the finished (but un-stuffed) sculpture…looking a bit like it crash-landed out of the sky! Actually I quite like the artwork in this mode – floppy and kind of melted-looking…the physicality of the materials really comes through. I almost contemplated displaying it this way (i.e. saggy & very ‘bag-like’)…but in the end I decided to stick with the plan and give it a ‘skeleton’ of sorts. As per the designs, I built an inner cardboard support to make it rigid – not unlike the cardboard they stuff into shoes and handbags when they go on display, to make them look as perfect as possible.
The stainless steel support was manufactured and shipped separately to the gallery, so I didn’t really get to see the artwork in its finished state until right before the exhibition opened. Thankfully there were no problems and it all fit together as per the plan. Here’s what it looked like at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre (note I moved it around to different areas in order to take the portfolio pics):
