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Renewing the Plumage I sculpture
The Plumage I sculpture from 2012 came back from a museum in the UK many years ago, completely destroyed unfortunately as they had roughly disassembled the sculpture by using a hand grinder. Terrible! I still had the old parts in my storage and suddenly I got excited to see if I could bring the sculpture back to life and if it still would be balanced.
Fortunately all the important parts where still there and after making some new axles, the sculpture could be reassembled and...... to my utmost surprise: still works perfectly, moving very smoothly and still very well balanced!
Here some images of the grinder damage, and I suspect also some hammering as I had to make the steel straight again
I filled the damaged parts by welding
and then restored the shape by grinding
This is the fully restored sculpture. I had to make a new pillar and decided to make the sculpture a little higher than the version of 2012, since that makes it even more impressive.
Also the rust I do no longer like for this sculpture and I decided to paint it.... pink! The sculpture will now continue as the 'Plumage I Flamingo'.
'No Time' finished
The sculpture with the composition of two parallelograms has been finished. Here you see the final assembly of the polished stainless steel links with the rotational pins.
For the background I made a disc of 40 cm diameter with a black color for a nice contrast with the shiny stainless steel. This photo shows 9 of the beautiful possible poses into which you can move the sculpture by hand.
Tensegrity sculpture Freedom
Tensegrity designs are very fascinating: structures with rods and wires where rods do not touch other rods. They show a delicate equilibrium, if you would cut just 1 of the wires the complete structure will collapse. I did some tests with a simple tensegrity structure, a beam supported by just 3 wires which are perfectly vertical, to investigate how the balance and the stability can be influenced.
After the experiments I made a new design of the floating beam: a nicely curved steel bar ending with a straight diagonal line. The floating beam is attached with 2 vertical wires below and 1 vertical wire on top.
Welding of the rod for attachment of the 2 wires below.
This is the complete first prototype of the new sculpture which I named 'Freedom'. Also the stand I designed with nicely curved shapes. The sculpture stands stable since the center of mass is exactly in the middle of the stand. The next step is to make the sculpture of polished stainless steel, its final state.
Composition with two parallelograms
I have designed a small balanced sculpture and made a first prototype of stainless steel. First I made a paper model of the mechanism, which consists of two floating parallellogram linkages with two fixed rotational points in the center.
This is a close up of two links connected with a pin...
... and this is the firs assembly of the prototype.
The finished prototype moves very smoothly and turned out very well balanced for which it stands still in each possible pose.
The next step is the design of the background. That will be a circular disc with which the sculpture can hang on the wall.
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