Calligraphy Prequel Specifications
Size: 40” w x 54” h x 7” d
Approximate Run Time: 3 Hours
Not for Sale
About Calligraphy Prequel:
In a sense I’ve been working on Calligraphy since 1989 when I stumbled across a fairly crude way to produce a double pendulum motion in a sculpture called Serpentine.
I loved the dynamic motion but I didn’t understand why it only happened at unpredictable times followed by boring periods of simple rotations with the front S form just hanging in a fairly fixed orientation. My mechanism designs of the time were weight driven and quite simple. They didn’t leave me a lot of room for experimenting. I eventually got Serpentine to work fairly well but then moved on to creating more predictable patterning sculptures. Over the years I occasionally played around with double pendulums trying to figure out how to get some control over the motion but gave up when a new unrelated idea came along. I have lots of ideas and have to admit I often gravitated to the ones that I was confident I could master in a reasonable time.
A couple years ago I “retired” and stopped taking orders for future delivery. This freed me to take all the time I needed to explore more complicated ideas. It is a pretty ideal work balance for me. Periods of intense study and design followed by just letting my brain rest and my hands work making sculptures where I’ve already solved the problems!
That’s a long way around to saying that one of the first projects I wanted to explore was creating chaotic motion sculptures. Chaos is my first piece of this design period, Calligraphy is the second. They are very different sculptures but both exhibit chaotic motion.
Chaos motion is created and controlled by a spring driven mechanism that only engages when the pendulums slow down a bit. This keeps the amount of energy added to the system more controlled. It is fairly quiet and long running as is the goal with most of my sculptures.
In Calligraphy I was going for the full Serpentine effect where both “pendulums” can rotate completely around their axis and the “free” pendulum can rotate in either direction. It ended up taking more than a year with lots of up and downs. This is a constantly driven double pendulum system. Eventually it accumulates enough energy to recreate the chaotic dance I first saw more than 40 years ago.
I would not call this a relaxing sculpture. I had to give up some run time and accept a higher noise level to get the motion I wanted. Still at 3 hours it runs about 6 times longer than my original Serpentine and is a good bit quieter so I did make some progress! Chaotic motion is by definition unpredictable which is what makes it so much fun to have in a kinetic sculpture. That same fact also makes it frustrating for someone like me who seeks to understand it better intuitively. I now have a better grasp of what type of energy levels are required to make fun things happen. But to say I’ve gained a real understanding would be inaccurate. Lots more to explore!