Angles_Lines_Planes

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Completed in my senior year at The Putney School. Below follow my notes for the exhibit. The first sculpture was completed around the same time over a four-day sculpture retreat at Vermont Stone Carvers. It is a piece that nicely bridged the fascination developing sensuous surfaces in freshman year with my angular explorations at the end of senior year.For the last trimester of Advanced Sculpture, we were
asked to do an independent project of our choice. I started by playing with angles on a chop saw.

These sculptures are abstract formal explorations of
angles, lines and planes. They are
more three-dimensional sketches than finished sculptures, created spontaneously
for the sake of form rather than carefully crafted for a finished product.

Every sculpture (with the exception of “M” and “O”)
was made with only a chop saw cutting at vertical and horizontal combinations,
a glue gun, and scrap wood. Almost
all of the sculptures involve combinations of only 0, 15, 30, and 45 degrees.

The forms evolved through the process of creating the
sculptures; I started each sculpture with the idea of a new method of
construction or a new parameter for assemblage, but never knowing what the
final form would be.

The sculptures are displayed in chronological order.

A. Wood cut
at combination vertical and horizontal angles (15, 30, 45), reassembled out of
order. Rule: line up the line that was already
carved out in wood.

B. Wood cut
at random combinations of vertical and horizontal angles (0, 15, 30. 45), then
glued on to board. Rule: Randomly
pack wood together as tightly as possible on board, making sure that outer
edges of wood blocks always line up with edges of board. This was basically an exploration of
chaos, and it was interesting to note 1) that if the block edges lined up on
three sides, they could not line up on the fourth side – the randomness had to
go somewhere – and 2) in the density of packed chaos, open spaces naturally
occur as the product of chaos.

C. Wood Cut at random combinations of vertical and
horizontal angles (0, 15, 30, 45), then reassembled out of order.

D. Same as
C, but trying to spiral back on itself to create a sense of density and volume.

E. Wood Cut
at identical vertical and horizontal angle combinations (15-15, 30-30, 45-45);
pieces rotated 180 degrees and reassembled in order, creating a perfect
matching joint “mirror effect.”
Interesting that this still produces a zig-zagging effect not in just
two, but in three dimensions.

F. Sticks
cut at different lengths and arranged in interlocking fashion, then glued
together at intersections.
Inspired by beautiful random forms created by piles of wood boards.
People often say that my work seems architectural, and
this piece could definitely have some architectonic application. I would love to make a building with
rooms defined by these intersecting lines, and roofs stretching like membranes
between the shifting planes. Could
this design, created randomly in space, ever have been envisioned on paper?

G. Cut
plywood at vertical and horizontal angle combinations, then reassembled out of
order. I thought of this as being
angles extended to lines and then flattened out into planes, then reassembled
to create volume. This could be
seen as an architectonic exploration.

H. A single
piece of plywood cut at vertical and horizontal angle combinations, then
reassembled out of order to create an shifting plane. Thin pieces of wood cut
at random lengths and angle combinations (0, 15, 30, 45) glued onto both sides
of plane. Goal was to create a
sense of dynamic chaos divided buy a thin barrier.

I. These
pieces were made from wood that curved into a large arc. Cut at random angle combinations (0,
15, 30, 45) and glued back together out of order. What was interesting was that the slight curvature of each
piece of wood and the dark stained color gave a certain elegance to the forms
not seen in “G,” even though they were based on same principles. I envision them as being independent
pieces that create different spaces in relation to each other in various
arrangements. They could be seen
as models for outdoor sculptures when separate, or, if they were multiplied, as
creating a sort of landscape in
combination with each other.

J. Cut wood
at identical vertical and horizontal angles, going from 45 degrees to 90
degrees and back to 45 degrees, increasing/decreasing angle by 5 degrees every
two cuts in order to create a gradual change. Then glued pieces back together
in order, rotating each piece slightly.

K. Glued together ¾ inch square PVC and white-painted
wood, arranged 2x3. Then cut into
three sections of equal length.
Lastly, made incisions at combination vertical and horizontal angles (0,
15, 30, 45). Had to be careful
never to cut all the way through the piece, or have two cuts intersect in such
a way that a chunk of wood would get cut out. One of the three sections was destroyed when I cut too deep
and at too extreme an angle (45/45).

L. At this point, I decided to start experimenting with adding
a graphic element to my sculptures – something that I had in the back of my
mind from the beginning of this project. I thought it would be interesting to
combine two- and three-dimensional art. I drew random intersecting lines with a
Sharpie and artist’s markers on a rectangular piece of plywood, creating a
gradation from black to brown to green. Then I cut the plywood at vertical and
horizontal combinations (0, 15, 30, 45), and glued the pieces back together
with all of the drawn-on surfaces facing the same way.

M. This
sculpture was one of my earliest ideas but on of the last that I made. I made the cuts so that they would
overlap at some places, then I reassembled the pieces in order, while leaving
space between the cuts. drilled through the pieces and stuck pieces of stiff,
thick gauge wire into the holes to join the pieces.

N. Took
irregularly shaped pieces of plywood and cut them in half. Then made shallow incisions at
different vertical angles. Had to
be careful not to cut pieces in half or to have two cuts intersecting in such a
way that a piece of plywood got cut off.
Then reassembled trying to create a “box” inspired by Oteiza’s
work. The incisions are also very
reminiscent of Libeskind. I could
definitely imagine this as a model for a townhouse.

O. This
piece is another hybrid of two- and three-dimensional art. This is the only
“finished” piece that I made.
Originally it was a plywood, glue and crayon sculpture. I decided to reproduce the model
exactly, but using nice wood, nails and acrylic paint. The process of reproducing a randomly
created model proved to be a challenging case of reverse engineering. The whole process of devising a method
of construction, sanding, painting primer, painting the various colors, and
finally assembling the pieces turned out to be quite painstaking.

If you view this sculpture from one angle, it is all
white, then, as you rotate, the secondary colors become visible, then you see
all color, then only the primary colors are visible, then it is all white
again. The color scheme is inspired
by the De Stijl usage of only white and primary colors, but with a twist based
on basic color theory: Primary colors are on the forward surfaces, secondary on
the upward surfaces. At the
intersections of primary colors you get the resulting secondary color, and at
the intersection of secondary colors you get the common primary color.

Conclusion

I found that just playing with angles, lines and
planes is endlessly fascinating to me.

I discovered the limits of the chop saw in two
ways. One, I was limited in the
incisions that I could make into surfaces or masses without cutting those
surfaces or masses apart (as in “K” and “N”) . Second, doing any type of joinery was limited to pieces
intersecting at 90 degrees. I
chose to just glue my pieces together.
I realized that doing actual joinery, especially at various angle
combinations, would be immensely complicated, requiring many painstaking
calculations and the use of hand tools.
I have immense respect for anyone who does fine joinery.

One of the questions when I started this project was
of scale – scale of dimensions, scale of materials, and scale of
craftsmanship. I found that for my
process, which was entirely spontaneous and exploratory, and where random
choices were an integral part of creating the sculptures, sticking to a small
size, using free “waste” materials, and not worrying about fine craftsmanship
(with the exception of “O”) was appropriate, giving me the freedom to just
play.

I have realized that ideas alone are not what make art
valuable; ideas are surprisingly easy to come by. What makes art valuable is its execution. It is the process of figuring out how
to make a sculpture, and then doing it meticulously and with nice materials,
that is 90% of the work in creating a fine sculpture.

A comment on my work that realy interested me was that
it was clearly influenced by nature – however, as I thought about angles and
abstract forms, nature was the farthest thing from my mind! This suggests to me that anything that
is irregular or random suggests nature to humans; these sculptures are random
composites of very precise, mechanical actions. It might also suggest that the inorganic and organic are
actually inseparable, because even as I pursued the most pure formal
expression, I ended up envoking something of the natural world.
Inspirations

If
you enjoyed my work, you might also like the work of artists who I have found
particularly inspiring: the
sculptors Robert Adams, David Nash, Jorge Oteiza, Eduardo Chillida, and Chuck
Ginever, and the architects Charles Rose and Daniel Libeskind (my favorite
architect).

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Alexandre Kinney

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Angles_Lines_Planes

Angles_Lines_Planes

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