A T T A C H M E N T O F H E A D S
The final part in the creation of my sculpture is to secure the heads firmly onto the metal frame. Luckily for me, I have another friend who agreed to help me complete this. He is an engineer and an avid welder who has a workshop that we were safely able to work from. The good news is that my friend has a technical mind and, after telling him about my FMP, had been pondering the best way we could attach the heads to the frame. The problem we were facing was how to hold each head still enough whilst the fibre glass set onto the arms of the frame - roughly a 20 to 30 minute process. A second problem would have been how we would access each branch once the heads were secured on.
He came up with two very good ideas to solve this problem:
1) Remove the washer that the farmer had added onto the fixed frame and instead attach the head to the frame with a hollow steel tube. This tube slips onto the end of each arm and the heads can then be removed for transportation.
2) Attach a single hinge to the end of each of the steel arms. Each hinge is made up of two metal brackets that slot into each other. So we would attach one part of the hinge to the back of the clay head, and the other to the end of each arm on the metal frame. This would then enable us to remove each head as and when we needed, solving both problems.
Option number two seemed to be the best way forward but we still had to figure out how to attach them firmly to the heads and the frame. This was difficult to do as the surface of the heads are very uneven. We decided to use thin metal strips to run along the inside of the heads. We shaped them as best as we could to fit the contour of each individual head, we then attached one part of the bracket to the metal strip and angled them all slightly differently so that the heads would tilt into each other, creating emotional connections between each. Adding the metal strips also strengthened each head which removes the worry of potential breakage. We glued them in place before adding fibre glass to several areas in order to hold the strips.
The inside of the heads actually ended up looking awful, and the complete opposite to how the outside looked. We decided to spray paint the back of the heads black to cover the raw metal which in turn solved the problem as best as possible. Aesthetically this looks much better.
Overall, i am feeling thrilled with the outcome of my final piece. With this being said, I would like to develop the concept of this installation further , i can see now how I could really express the essence of my soI in this form more effectively.
