Enraged at my inability to make another WIP work yesterday afternoon, I grabbed whatever I could find - a hoe head and some unused pipe caps - and, this afternoon, after a morning of staring, gave him a body (mostly the non-reel bits of a reel mower, but there's some chainlink fence and garage spring in there) and a name, Sergio (chosen because that's the first name I imagined shouting if he fell). Still can't make the other piece work, but at least I have Sergio.
Latest metal creature which started as something else until it decided what it wanted to be, a not quite-a-cat cat, a Scattercat, ready to pounce. It used to be a broken typewriter, license plates, chain link fence, pipe caps, and a Slow Moving Vehicle sign. Rather proud of this little devil.
An odd little experiment in metal and (scrap)wood: I’ve had a glockenspiel among my possessed oddities for a number of years, and, as the sound offends me, I never touched it after having to play it in high school. But, since I’ve stumbled into metalwork, I lusted after a purpose for the keys beyond a harbinger of bleeding eardrums. Enter: angle grinder, cut-off wheel, and decades of pent-up instrumental loathing to separate the keys from the frame – pieces of which found new life as part of Snippy and the weird tentacle creature – which culminated in… the keys being unwilling to weld together to form anything.
But I had, over the past month since my failure to create anything from them, been moving the keys about in a sort of hypotonic glitch-art way, attempting to find something to build from them. Yesterday, I figured it out: instead of making one piece, make a way to continue fiddling about in hypnotic glitchy fashion. And lo, from piles of other failed wood projects was birthed Glockbox. Can still remove the keys and reorder them as I please, but I’ve been fiddling with the pattern in the video above for most of the morning. Rather proud of this experimental little oddity, the best solution I’ve come up with so far to a deeply annoying vexation. Having far more fun with the glockenspiel in this form than I ever had with that instrumental monstrosity in my previous life.
Fun morning of playing with my electric metal shears and cutting up bits and bobs for the WIP, a prototype for something else (see: this week's earlier Replicate post for why I'm considering most of my metal things prototypes) with occasional glimmers of the writer coming out to play as I pick at the WIP over on that side of The Shed. Acceptance that my primary method is to go do other things while things percolate until a line or phrase shows up that fits and then bang the whole thing out while ignoring the guilt of not going about things the way I used to (because, clearly, that worked out oh so well). Out into society for a bit today, society being a waiting room and a book store and maybe an antique mall. Status: fit for public consumption, more or less.
Fought the icemud which is now just mud mud and put a new, vinyl roof on MetalShack (because the original one didn't survive last night's freezing rain, much to my welding table's dismay; oh well, it's seen worse), put up the rest of the flame-retardant curtains, and used the remaining vinyl roofing to line the inside of the ceiling. Pretty sure The Shed's protected from my spark-inciting passion, so now I can get back to play. It isn't pretty - nor is gold my jam - but it'll do the job.
Waiting patiently for my flame-retardant blankets to arrive so I can make MetalShack a little safer for all involved but already the benefit of a dedicated metalshop is evident. Started clearing out the workshop side of things – much nicer space without buckets of scrap metal all over the inside – and figuring and staring at the present metalwork WIP. In so doing, a realization: metal is the first medium I've played with in which full-scale, tactile replication (or gathering, but why would an ornamental hermit like myself do that?) is the only way for multiple people to experience the work as it was intended: in other words, if someone wants a work that I want to keep, I either have to remake the work or part with it, bleeding and screaming. Sure, I can take a picture of the work and stuff it online, but that's not the work: that – unlike writing, unless intended solely for physical release – is an approximation of it. My 10 minutes are nearly up: perhaps I’ll ruminate on this notion further tomorrow or later today maybe or move on to some other similarly useless mental gymnastic.
Honoring David Lynch's wisdom to always have a setup (and perhaps ameliorate today's midday concerns?) by transforming my scrap wood space into a dedicated metalwork shack behind The Shed. Still have to figure out the power situation and add fire retardant blankets or tarps as walls (including over the metal sheets that separate MetalShack fromThe Shed), but it's getting there.
Conversation with a good friend the other week made me realize what's going on with my move towards metalwork: I'm redisovering my love for and need of tactile creation. Suppose this love makes sense, given that my entrance into the arts was playing drums (hit stuff and that makes cool sounds) and that my downfall(s) began when I shifted more into the internal, less tactile arts (music composition, especially, though writing can't be absolved of its complicity in my descent into creative schizophrenia). Filmmaking was far more tactile than writing – though since I've also started drawing and cartooning, I'm bringing more tactile sensation to my storytelling (should it survive). And I can't forget that I've long considered accepting the Executive Director position at the NPO to be the biggest mistake of my career: I missed getting my hands dirty too much. Alas, live and learn. Eventually.
