Marjorie m429

People used to ask me if I ever sketched out my work before I made a figure. I used to say that junk metal doesn’t come in the shape and scale you want it to be. But recently I began to realize that I wasn’t using my full metalworking skills by not really working the metal.

Humans have a wide range of relative dimensions, and it’s fun to play in that range without thinking too much, to see what kind of figure comes out though a combination of chance and whim. But there are some parts of humans that are capable of expression more than the rest. Most would agree that the eyes say a lot – but for me, the hands may be the number one choice. It’s a part of the sculpture that has the most potential for human expression, and therefore needed to be approached with an intense attention to detail.

Using my newly revisited powers of subtractive sculpting, I set forth seeking a metal object resembling a palm of a hand – roughly a flat square solid object. The closest I could find was my collection of square nuts. I had the idea to cut it in half height-wise, giving me two palms to start with.

I was able to ‘fill the hole’ in each palm with a machine screw of the same thread size and pitch, trimmed with a hack saw.

The fingers were cut from smaller machine screws – each digit was cut to length – I used my own hand as a reference to scale down match the size of the palm.

As I worked on the hands, I would take breaks and pick out parts that I felt were proportional matched – the work I had done so far was one quarter human scale which fit into my Mercury class of robot – about sixteen inches tall with lots of room for adding lots of details. Perfect.

quarter scale make the math go easy.

As I picked the metal pieces to have enough material to sculpt with hacksaw and file. In other words, realized I needed to make sure they had enough material in all dimensions. I had to re-shift my approach to making robots from additive to subtractive. I was excited to push hard into this exciting new realm, even though the work was a lot more time-consuming.

 

 

Each part, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, became an opportunity to work the metal it’s ultimate form. Each joint needed to be crafted to give the impression of not only potential movement, but actual ‘sitting on her bones’ – a je ne sais quoi so elusive in depicting the human form. Having a feeling of real weight on the joints is a subtlety I have been chasing for decades.

I’ve made a lot of handsome robots using large steel machine nuts for a long time. But this nut – this exact nut – had me thinking hard. I needed to imagine the shape of the head inside the nut. I marked and erased many lines before making a solid guess and started cutting.

If you were to make a robot cranium out of this nut, what lines would you draw and what angles would you cut?

Squared off jaws don’t inherently read as feminine, so the jawline of this robot needed deep cuts and careful aim. Even though the angles can be tricky and it’s a slow process, hand cuts will always win out over machine cuts when it comes to my work. People aren’t perfectly symmetric and therefore my figures need to be the same.

 

 

 

For hinge joints such as elbows and knees, I needed to create a realistic looking joint that hints at the potential for movement: what better way to achieve this that making an actual working joint and then locking it in place? I used small nuts and threaded rods to create hinges. For the joints to sit closely the connecting appendages, things need to nest together. I use a hacksaw to cut a bunch of grooves, and then knock them out – something I’ve seen woodworkers do.

 

 

The hand – the first thing I made for this piece – became the high bar for excellence for the rest of her. It felt more alive than anything I’ve made before. I decided the pose of the robot should be focusing on the hand too. Not only did this tiny hand represent my awakening into seeing metal differently after decades, it could also represent machines becoming seemingly more self-aware with artificial intelligence. She should be looking at this hand as if she’s truly seeing it for the first time. This makes me think of how far robotics have come since I started sculpting them in 2006 – what was once science fantasy is now close enough to reality where my work has shifted away from fantasy – So much so that it kind of spins my head thinking about the meaning of sculpting humanoid robots. Will designers be inspired by my work? I certainly hope so!

 

 

As more and more highly convincing body parts were made and connected together, the more excited I became.

 

The viewer is invited to bring a magnifier to see the file marks left and the polished out parts. Grooved cut with a rotary tool to make seams like access panels. I love to leave small amounts of file marks on my work. In fabrication in production this is a big no-no, but for art, it’s letting the viewer have a glimpse of the intense work that is needed for hand-crafted steel at this scale and level of detail. My file marks are part of my signature. For a small piece it has a whole lot to offer.

As I thought about the meaning of Marjorie more and more, I felt if this were truly to be about this new dangerous technology, I needed to add a subtle element of danger to Marj. She needed a raygun to represent the danger. I made one from an old skeleton key and attached it to her thigh. Although the raygun can wiggle a little in place it cannot come off. This way it doesn’t seem like an actual part of her, but can’t separate and get lost. Her left hand rests above the raygun in a subtle gunslinger at the ready position.

 

Even though I had a pose planned, it was fun to have her do a wave before I set the posture in place. Hello, world!

 

I’ve made a lot of robot with round feet, which have their charm, but everything was so sculpted on this one that I needed to take great care with this last step. since there can be a lot of complex movement in the ankles of a human, I needed this piece to seem to have the same ability. I added as much connecting rods, servos and bearings as I could fit. I even added some bronze pieces for access panels. The bronze panels were cut from a small piece of work gifted to me by an artist and friend of mine, K. Gretchen Greene. Gretchen hoped I integrated the metal into my work someday – it took over a decade for me to be ready, fortunately my materials have a very long shelf life.

A Transformative Piece needs a Meaningful Name

This piece is a very singular piece because it embodies the paradigm shift from my old way of sculpting to a new one – so much so, that it merits reflection upon my very artistic identity. So much so, that this is the last sculpture to bear the name Skunkadelia. The work and thought that went into making Marjorie changed me – so much that I felt time to change the name of my new work. She is the bridge between artist periods.

I decided to name this important creature after someone very important to me: my high school art teacher, Marjorie Picchi of Holliston, Massachusetts. Marjorie helped me realize that I wanted to be living and breathing art as much as possible, noticing the subtle things overlooked, and trying to fathom as much as I can in doing so.

It is my hope that others enjoy what Marjorie m429 offers. Even though she has a primary message in her pose, she’s versatile enough to give a wide range of expressions. The pose above looks like she’s inviting you somewhere. What feelings does Marjorie show to you as a viewer when you see the different poses at different angles?