Some of our favorite places to visit are sculpture gardens including Storm King in NY State. We have started collecting ideas of other places to visit through recommendations and web searching. This is how we stumbled upon The Singing Ringing Tree in England.
This award-winning sculpture is a fascinating combination of man-made metals and nature's breath - the wind. It stands just under 10 feet high in the Pennine Mountains looking over Burnley, in Lancashire, England. This sculpture was enginered by the British architecture firm Tonkin Liu. It is made of glavanized steel tubes that harness the wind to send low melodic tones over the land. Here is an excellent YouTube video about the process of developing and making the sculpture:
Someday when we make our way back to Europe this will certainly be on our list of places to visit. Have you seen The Singing Ringing Tree in person? What were your thoughts?
Inventor Released is the second wall-mounted kinetic sculpture designed by David. He created it immediately following B.W. Cornwallis in the spring of 1976 (Link to post about B.W.) He recognized the inefficiencies in B. W. and was trying to improve upon them.
This sculpture, like its predecessor, is an escapement mechanism. Escapements have been used for centuries in clock making and can be used to measure regulated increments of time. David has always modified escapements, not worrying about their time keeping characteristics but instead working to maximize motion. It has allowed for a creative freedom that has always impacted his work. Compare the very visual motion in Inventor Release to the amount of motion you see in a clock.
In Inventor Released, David added an arm connected to the rotating wheel with a string. This allowed for some degree of adjustment by varying the string length. This is a great sculpture to study because it is one of the simplest and most revealing of David's designs. Basically, the weight is attached but can't descend because it is being held in place by the wooden ratchet. The pendulum wheel spins in one direction shortening the string and lifting the arm which causes the ratchet to release allowing the weight to drop just one notch before re- engaging.
The power from the release is transferred back through the arm giving it a needed push.
It now has enough energy to cause the main wheel to wind in the opposite direction, again shortening the string and again releasing the ratchet to repeat the process.
David's early pieces were all powered by descending weights. This is also similar to many early clocks. Inventor Released had the one descending weight and the higher you mounted the piece, the longer it would run. The limited factor was always that you needed to be able to reach the sculpture to wind it up again!
In the early years the inevitable question was, "Is it perpetual motion?" Clearly not. It requires the viewer to keep winding it up.
As you listen to the video you will hear the very loud and rhythmic click. David knew that a loud noise is the result of an inefficient mechanism. (It was also truly annoying to live with!). It was an effort to try and reduce the noise that kept David designing. A trend in David's work has always been that new designs evolved as he tried to solve things he didn't like about previous ones. Much inspiration came from his own work.
Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí painted amazing paintings of dripping clocks. His most famous work, The Persistence of Memory, depicts his dripping clocks perfectly. Artist Phillippe Guillerm takes a similar approach to his spring instrument sculpture by removing the usual rigidity of the instruments.
According to Guillerm's website, "Guillerm began his professional life in Paris, France the city where he was born in 1959 and lived for twenty years... Guillerm's music-inspired sculptures are whimsical and curvaceous string instruments, he uses the theme as a way of expressing human nature and needs, you see an instrument, he sees an attitude."
These are some pretty inpresive pieces carved from various exotic and local wood such as Mahogany, aspen, Jacaranda, poplar, wengue, purple heart, and walnut.
Stone can be used to create small delicate sculptures and colosal pieces that tower over the Earth. Chris Booth is an artist that creates the latter.
Bukker Tillibul. 2002 Swinburne University of Technology, Lilydale, Victoria, Australia.
In an article written by John K. Grande at Sclupture.org, artist Chris Booth was "[b]orn in Kerikeri, New Zealand, in 1948, [and] has pursued sculpture associated with the land, earth forms, and indigenous peoples of the regions where he has worked. He received his initial education at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and then branched out to study with various sculptors in Europe..."
Booth creates using slab and boulder stone often combining the two to create beautiful sculptures on varying landscapes. Here are some samples of his work:
Untitled, 2010 - 2011. Rotoroa Island, Hauraki Gulf, NZ
Nikau. 1996 Botanic Gardens, Christchurch, New Zealand.
More images and information about his work can be found at his website.
David and I collected lots of video footage of his early work while preparing for his TEDx talk. We promised to start sharing some of it on the blog and this post is a first in that series. It makes all the sense to start at the beginning.
B.W. Cornwallis is David's very first wall-mounted kinetic sculpture. It was designed and built back in 1975. David was trying to answer the question that people always asked of his human-powered gadget Xylo. "But can you make it run longer?"
His first experiment to do so had been a behemoth of a design called Albert. Albert was a great learning exercise, and it worked, but it was huge, free-standing and lacked grace. The design break-through came when David started using the wall for support and B.W. is the first of a long series of wall-mounted, weight driven, kinetic sculptures.
B. W. is very much a sculpture of a mechanism, as were all of David's first experiments. He worked to develop imaginative designs using simplified escapement theory. Very basically, a falling weight attached to a string provides energy to the sculpture while the sculpture itself regulates the fall of the weight.
The rolling wheel shifts the balance of the mechanism, releasing the catch on the cog. The weight starts to fall, this turns the cog causing the cog to change angle of the ramp mechanism the rolling wheel is on. The mechanism then catches the cog, preventing further fall of the weight. The wheel continues rolling shifting balance again and the cycle repeats. This basic concept powers all of David's weight and spring driven sculptures. It is easier to see in B.W.
B. W Cornwallis was first shown at a small Connecticut craft fair and sold almost immediately, along with Inventor Released and Serendipity. David had made one of each (he really didn't expect that they would sell!) and he went back to his workshop to build additional copies. He couldn't get B. W. to work again. He quickly learned to always keep a working prototype of all his work to be able to refer back to it.
B.W. was not a very reliable design and David quickly moved on to better concepts. The next year, the original B.W. buyers returned and said it no longer worked. David offered a trade for any new designs because he really wanted his first design back. We still have the original B.W. Cornwallis and unpacked it after 35 years to video tape it. David set it up and with a minimum of tweaking, he got it working again for this video.
It was excitement all over again. It worked! It is a great piece of history!
